Slowing down the game and tech

[Antrine]

Your right! After much research and tweaking I have figured out that the 'rules' file 'Big Huge' map 'Data' line about 3/4 of the way down on the page needs to be adjusted to 140 instead 160. Those are the parameters for the largest possible map size. This is still 'twice' the size by area than the default 100 sized Big Huge.

After much playing around with the Editor I was able to make a basic scenerio with a map of my own design at that size, 140. It really does make a big difference in play. And the slowed down Age changes by cost and time really allow for battle after battle long before you get to Age III. I always play 'Survival of the Fittest', on the Toughest setting, as this delivers very aggressive computer opponents.

On another note, this game's editor so far as concerns me, needs a 'detailed help or gaming guide' !!!! Moving the civilization starting places around is so darn tricky!

Anyway, I hope any using my file modifications are finding them useful except that map size needing adjustment.
Need any more info, let me know.

Antrine

[V'ger]

Hi,

Did you try 150? I'm playing a 150 right now and I can build to the edge. Are there any other pitfals?

To me, there is a problem with your mod at the far end of tech. I needed 54,000+! knowledge to research the last Science and Commerce techs. Not only that, I think there is an absolute cap of 999 to any resource, as that is the cap for knowledge. So, having the tech get that expensive would mean we wouldn't see those last three techs.

I could afford the military future tech that gives the shield. (Thank God, or I would have been lit up like a Christmas tree. They REALLY don't like it when you build the Space wonder.)

[Antrine]

No, I have not tried 150, my thinking was stuck in increments of 20's. Good Point! I will next game.
I have never played to the end, or even to the fourth Age for that matter. I keep tweaking maps and scenarios that leave me playing the bulk of the time in the First, Second and Third Age.

There was a modification, I did intuitionally, that doubled or amplified the costs of the last techs (as I understand these triggers in the rules). I will find it and post it for you, if want to change it back. I did it because I hate the game to end to quickly and/or change too dramatically with ever more powerful techs/weapons.

Glad you survived however, we would not want the end of the game to be dull!! In theory one could be hit with a few dozen nukes in a bad case scenerio!

I really like this game! However I prefer maps of my making.

Antrine

[Antrine]

V'ger,

Greetings!

Here is the line in the data/rules file
1/8 on down find ramp_final value="[50%]
The key is 50%, somehow I changed it to 500% instead of 100%. I will try it out myself at 75% for awhile.

However, 50% is default setting

In addition, I carefully tried out the 150 setting for Big Huge maps and found it 10 spaces left and bottom dead, or non-functional on each map. So I am convinced that 140 is max setting for maps.

Again,
Happy Gaming
Antrine

[solops]

Playing with the the changes above has been a great improvement. RoN now feels more like a strategy game than an arcade game.

[Antrine]

Hi solops!

I am glad you have found this so. I have continued to tweak the game files with higher commerce caps in the beginining ages, higher individual costs on some techs such as writing, to delay the use of auto-transport, unless you wish to 'pay the freight' for the privilage.

I also multiplied the Age Change Clock going from the Second to Third Age by 20 and the next by 15 times and most of the other Ages by 12 times or so. Also implemented very increased Age change costs to Age III leaving one to decide between the merits of fielding a large army or navy (80+ pop) or pay the steep costs to start the clock ticking to Age III. The computer seems to do both favoring Age change, however I favor building large expensive armies so when I fight on two fronts I win. Winning I still have to cough up the goods or risk being buried eventually by better advanced armies.

To date last night I have enjoyed on a large map sized 140 the best best running battle so far and this one about the eighth significate battle of this Age. It encompassed hundreds of units (pop) I had built up 3 combined armies and a light cavalary force for the fouth on a river divided front three computer screens wide. On my border I had three forts, four towers, two cities one either end spread far apart. Feeding the front were 3 barracks, 3 stables and 3 sieges. I enjoyed an AI employing real tactics and I countered with a complicated series of whole army moves spinkled with some more basic but solid manuvers.

It was intense for long while. I was left with barely an army and half standing but in bad shape! Meanwhile I managed with two navies elsewhere (on the other side of my empire) to fend off the bulk of a widely spaced two pronged (sneaky AI) attack at my rear by another AI civilization.

In times past (in the making of war games) that battle would have constituted an whole game by itself! Look how far a few decades have brought us. I used to do this in the Army, back then using large boards, standing counters and sticks.

This game is a sleeper, a gold mine once you slow the Age changes and the racing along the tech tree like some kind heedless all powerful god. It should hurt to move through the Ages of Time. Just my humble opinion!!

I am going to celebrate by upgrading my vidoe card toot sweet, along with a larger monitor (to 21 from 17) so I can swing scenerios sporting a colorful string of epic battles making a long war stretched out over time. Remember the 100 years war?

Survival of the fittest


Sincerely,
Antrine

[solops]

Great! Are you updating the files to which you have posted links to reflect the changes you like best?

[Pulse79]

Yeah Antrine it would be great to try your changes out

[Antrine]

Greetings!!

Here find amended mod files 03 May 03:

http://apolyton.net/upload/files/Antrine/03May03_RulesFiles.zip

Archive files of same name and swap.
In RoN/Data/

http://apolyton.net/upload/files/Antrine/Beta_Germans_31May03.zip

For those who wish to try a simple scenario, unzip these and place in your
RoN/scenario folder after having changed out the above two files.

In this scenario you are the Germans, slide the difficulty as desired after you start or stick to the ‘tough’ setting. This is also a diplomatic conquest of I believe 75 or 80%.


Special note for using Map Generation/Simple Scenario constructing with these modified files:

In the Big Huge setting the map will be sized 140 instead 100.
This is effectively twice the area.
Caution: Do not use the Nile Delta or Old World on this Big Huge setting

A very good one to use for balanced game play is the British Isles by modifying the Seed setting thus. Chose a ten string high numbered set such as: 7896587698 and then lock.
Also select Big Huge with 8 players.

Generate:
You ‘cannot’ move the starting positions of computer-controlled players; change the one human player to computer. Duplicate Nations are common eliminate dupes by going to Nations tab. Leave only three to five computer players.

Next, decide where your empire will be located relative to the remaining computer players. Go to the terrain tab select edit land. Paint the land where you will be enlarging that continent etc. Make likewise minor land change elsewhere as desired. Place ‘one’ river, usually betwixt your location and a computers. Apply changes. Now to remodel your area do the following, however noting that you will place a new generated Nation as your own capital as the last step. This map generation is temperamental, sorry for the long discourse.

With your area or full continent on your side of the river you must first ‘remove’ all features thusly:
Terrain tab, hit decorations, hit ‘remove all’
Hit remove, and manually eliminate all trees in your section only
Go to Resource tab, hit remove resource and manually remove all resources again in your area of the map only.
Now back to terrain tab select edit land, there select remove and manually remove all mountains.

All this is for one reason; map building is first feature set has best precedence.

Now to build in this cleaned off area on your side of the river.

Place a generous selection of large and medium mountains. (do not bother with small ones)
Do not use the cliff feature, as it is hoggy and shaky.
Instead, employ this fine trick to make seaward cliffs that are unit navigational. Select the paintbrush setting, alternatively as the lay of the land requires to 1x5 and 5x1. Select ‘Ocean’ tab painting in one or two pixels on the land in from the water. This making an ‘ocean line’ now imbedded in the land along the coast. This trick creates great seaward cliffs! The compiler modifies these ocean pixels to sharply lowered land relative to surrounding terrain. Ocean painting does not stick as ocean unless it is several pixels thick, satisfied with setting in as many as you might want; hit ‘apply changes’.

Now back to your map place the trees and resources generously about, however still leaving some open area for cities and maneuvering armies. One more map making point of importance, check your coast lines make sure you have ‘deep water’ harbors right up to the land, otherwise your ships will get stuck and waste your valuable attention. In addition, you can only do this map modification ‘once’ for every time you hit ‘apply changes’ the map editor keeps smoothing out the terrain thereby eliminating the cliffs.

One step left, click add nation at upper left corner, click the nation tab if not satisfied and delete, repeat until a nation of your liking is randomly chosen by the computer. Stay on the nation setting, click through the three to five computer nations and verify their individual settings. You must however give each computer player a minimum of 3600 in resources to start with or they may ‘lay fallow’ way to long as they try to pay for a favored expensive tech. Personally, I prefer to keep the human player at 200 starting resources and take my advantage in two or three well-placed pre-built forts along my border!

When you click to buildings to set your capitol, also place the forts. The other computer players will have other assorted pre-built buildings depending on their own profiles, so when you start this scenario it will be even odds.

Also, be sure to visit the scenario tab and set your playing preferences and then saving as new scenario before you exit.

[dearmad]

For my own modding I noticed when upped the cost of certain techs (initial science for one) too much it crippled the AI and gave me about a two age advance on them by enlightenment (playing tough level AI). So I watched a bunch of my replays and noticed the AI did not handle its pop cap very well, always having a few to spare unless nothing was going on but it would only ever fill up about a university and a half with scholars.

Here's basically what I did:

I upped the pop cost of scholars to 2, which puts me in a quandary as to how to play sometimes- go for the knowledge that 3 or 4 universities would afford me at the risk of a smaller standing army or limp along with the AI and try to manage things tactically until I can inflict a mortal wound.

I also upped the cost of the age advance techs by about 2x and the time to advance by about 4x, AND I play on Extermely costlys/slow, so were's talking 4x/8x here; with scholars costing 2 pop apiece, it makes for a really tricky time balancing the needs of the present (an army!) with the future (knowledge!). For ONCE I don't regularly peak out at +999 with my knowledge income!

Also I LOWERED the amount of commerce plusses in Wonders and with each Commerce advance so it goes something like 75/125/150/200/225/250/275 I think. The lower amount of resources overall means you have a few core cities with updated mills and such (the heartland) and then redundant cities acting as backup incase things go badly somewhere, along with other cities you just take over in order to inflict damage upon the AI.

I just played an epic game with my tech advance slowdown mod that lasted 7 hours straight last night. I tried to go for the extra scholars to get an age advance on the AI (4 WHOLE universities!) but they trailed me or led me all the way until the very end when I just had a HUGE economy constantly throwing bodies into the war machine at "the front" which moved inexorably nearer and nearere their capitals until I jumped them on nukes.

In between, there were TONS of battles at each age demanding new strategies and sometimes mixed armies of various technologies because I couldn't afford all the upgrades at once (which was more normal before). REAL choices as to what to advance next and what to use. REAL paying attention to the units they sent my way and trying to counter them.

[Pulse79]

Hey dearmad would you post your files that you altered? I would like to try them out...thanks

[dearmad]

Ok here is the version of things I used last night:

A few more things I should mention:

I've changed ships a bit: they cost more POP (4 for the big ship line, 2 for the others) and materials and are better armored and a little bit better in HP and attack, since you won't build as many. I thought they cluttered up the game, 1 BB should MEAN something, and now it does. Fishing boats are stillonly 1 pop. Overall result in my experience is you'll see about half as many AI ships and build about half as many yourself. Note that Carriers only cost 2 pop though, since their airplanes cost 1 pop.

Tech epoch changes also cost other resources as well- the INDUSTRIAL age, for example, takes a bit of lumber (to represent material you burn in factories and steam engines) to go up to.

Note that COMMERCE LEVELS ARE REDUCED SIGNIFICANTLY, and while the TEXT HELP for WONDERS doesn't reflect their changes, ALL COMMERCE AFFECTING AND MATERIAL AFFECTING WONDERS had that part of their effects cut in half. Net effect: it just balances them within the scale of things.

Also changed the names of the diff. levels names for amusement Chieften, Prince, King and all that.

The first tech for science and civics are almost normal in price- the AI uses a script in the early game that makes changing the cost of those two techs not a good idea unless you change the AI- which I didn't.

Commandos and such snipe a little faster- they were way too slow IMO.

remember: SCHOLARS are TWO (2) pop people now- they come with teacher's assistants, now you can say.

[The Rusty Gamer]

Antrine,

Started playing with your mod which is great - much more like a long saga than a quicky which I like just fine.

It now means something to build more libraries since research is so slow you want to get simultaneous research going! Great!

However, one problem I noticed (playing the British) that my commerce limit started at 187, but after researching commerce level 1 it jumped to 437 - that is a +250! Is there something not quite right here?

As a suggestion for the future, I'd also like to see increased costs and times of ALL upgrades including units etc. Also, building wonders should take about 10 times longer and cost about 10 times more don't you think?

[Antrine]

Hi Rusty Gamer!

Well since that mod I have continued to playtest those and other changes. As far as the British commerce level jumping up; what Age where you in 1 or 2?

Anyway, I have since upgraded my video card to Radeon 9500 Pro and already had 1gig of sdram with a 1.8 processor. Thought about jumping up the processor too, however it does not seem compelling at this time. Refresh rates have soared to 60 and routinely clock in the high forties. A larger monitor is in transit.

That being so I have upped the anty, commerce caps I recently pushed even higher so that you start at 250 and jump up rapidly to 450 and 600, I have even achieved in play 770 in three catagories. And that with with 7 cities. I raised the early on pop caps because in Age III I was routinely hitting 450 pop limits.

Now as to philosophy of game play and the balance thereto.

These points stand out to me: Roboust economy, namely so I have a chance of smashing two or three opponents at the same time. I have so far only upped the costs of the main Ship of Lines, the heavy ones all the way up to aircraft carriers, increasing both costs, strengths and pop. Especially considering an aircraft carrier costs 1 billion each and sport the population of a whole town.

Not all techs are raised high or clocks slowed, for sake of constrast and using 'Knowledge' as an passive control mechanism for advancement. With, Knowledge, that is, Universities and Scholars one must pay gold and build many of them and still have to 'wait' a long time for enough 'Knowledge' to move forward both by Age and some critical military tech advancements, that would quickly change the feel of game out of the earlier Ages.

As I said more changes have been made since my last file update:

Major points:

Ten Farms each city instead 5

Shrinking the 'guy' spread for early Ages units, so they look more tight in formations. Mostly from 12 to 8 and cavalry squeezed as well proportionally.

Reducing the distance you can build up against forts and for forts to forts from 12 to 1. Also slightly raising their hit points (25%). So that now you can effectively build WALLS with a combination of forts, towers and lookouts. Works really well along rivers, pluging up gaps between mountain/forests. Leave just enough room for some units to pass zig zag. This affords a treachorous approach to ones Empire. Especially early on, if you have the Romans. I have even had computer armies on the toughest setting actually back off instead of attacking.

I also multiplied the Age timers again, now times 20 the original settings in many cases. I have probably done a few more tweaks that I have now forgotten.

The impact of all this is getting quite interesting, again remembering the very large maps (140). The computer player generates robust economies, straight away and builds very large armies again and again. Armies of 25 to 50 units each. They fling them far and wide.

Without either very large and powerful navies if water separates or now these walls and traps I build around my clustered cities I would be over-run toot sweet!!

Not to mention my keeping standing armies myself in the order of 100 to 200 units. But the economies are strong and the techs and Ages slowed down to a crawl I concentrate on the epic side of Empire building and some wild and carefully planned wars.

Sincerely,
Antrine

[The Rusty Gamer]

Actually, I haven't tried playing on the big map, I've been playing on a smaller one.

It would be good to be able to set different commerce, population settings etc for different map sizes perhaps?