Based on what we know so far, what do you want to mod in CtP2

[TheLimey]

I'm awaiting my (Christmas present) copy eagerly... although the joy might be taken out of it by then.

I am intially looking to implement the limited Wonders concept, and maybe an ICS solution

I know theres already people talking about a legion (very minor, but it sounds sensible to me too)

Anyone else have any other concepts they think they might try out?

one of these days i'm changing the names of the diffculty levels back to normal...

[Lodi]

Sugar plum fairies, sugar plum fairies.

[Gedrin]

Well I for one started a very extensive mod all from my annoyance of two things. If the tech tree posted is accurate they still appear to be there.

1. Muskets are miniature cannons. Cannons were the first weapon to project anything with the use of gunpowder. The posted tech tree still has that backwards.

2. The posted tech tree still appears to allow scientists to map the human genome without the need for computers.

Further to this I plan to change the Chaos Theory to String Theory... since Chaos Theory has little to do with GUT... if anything it's good for economic models... supply demand predator prey models.
Then there's Human Cloning... digital Encryption?
Hmmm... and I can't see the Republic...
And Ballistics without Geometry is cute.

*sigh* I'm not going to continue. Lets just say I think the tree could use some work.

On another note I use XL to fix a date (read turn) that I wish to discover the tech and the cost of it is calcuated based on its distance from the prereqs. Every since tech has its own cost. I imagine I'll do that once I determine a good curve for it to match.

I also cut all knowledge co-effs in half and generally quadrupled science outputs. Again spreadsheeting this stuff showed that CD's mod fixed the science problem but caused a gold problem. However from what I gather the science from gold improvements has been dealt with.

In my mod I currently have -1 hap on all wonders.
(meaning yes most of them are -ve... really cuts my wonder mania I'll tell ya... and well the AI does not do it anyway... thats why I did this).

And I imagine I'll implement my triggers too.
Bureaucracy Tax; Pop Migration; Refugees from captured cities; Terrorist strikes, but I'll have to test it out some before I do so.

Gedrin

[Drakenred]

quote: Originally posted by TheLimey on 11-13-2000 05:21 PM I'm awaiting my (Christmas present) copy eagerly... although the joy might be taken out of it by then. I am intially looking to implement the limited Wonders concept, and maybe an ICS solution I know theres already people talking about a legion (very minor, but it sounds sensible to me too) Anyone else have any other concepts they think they might try out?

a lot depends on Just how mutch slack you have in the program,For example, if you can add new Teck advances into the Tecktree, if their is a hard cap to the number of Units or City improvments you can add, if you can add more New-Diferent WOWs and FoW to the game, if their is a hardcap to the Numbers of govenments you can controll, Ect. (take my idea of having Diferent government classes, each of witch gets a New Govenment every Tecklevel, if CTP only suports the Govements listed, then your kind of stuck with the govenments you have, not with trying to play the game as a Govenment-class for the entire game, (my idea is to have Eco- athortarian- Democratic\republic- Thologan- and Merchantiel based governments for example, resulting in ~ 31 posible Governments (Anachy avalible to all, and each having a diferent starting govenment with individual bonuses and penalites culminating in the final Government type for each class)

I would also like to see More units (Legonaire, pre-dreadnaught, Dreadnaught(posibly with a WOW of FoW for being the First with a True Dreadnaught, reflecting what realy happend when the HMS Dreadnaught was launched), Battle ship, Super Battleship,Lt Cruiser, Cruiser, Heavy Cruiser, Battle Cruisers, Zeplin, Early tank, Biplane era Aircraft, Self propeled Artilery-asualut gun, Mobile flack(early SAM, or more acuratly, ) Light Cariers, Dive bomber, a pre-jet era bomber, a short range Harier type Jet era fighter, the Marine Amphibiouse Asualt convertion Battleship(the convertion of the Iowa class that would have alowed it to cary a Harier Squadon, and a Marine Asualt Batlaion.. . .

[Drakenred]

i wonder if its posible to do a reverse colonisation?(ie everyone starts out under the sea, and has to migrate to the land)

[WesW]

quote: Originally posted by Gedrin on 11-13-2000 10:17 PM Well I for one started a very extensive mod all from my annoyance of two things. If the tech tree posted is accurate they still appear to be there.... Hmmm... and I can't see the Republic... *sigh* I'm not going to continue. Lets just say I think the tree could use some work. ...And I imagine I'll implement my triggers too. Bureaucracy Tax; Pop Migration; Refugees from captured cities; Terrorist strikes, but I'll have to test it out some before I do so. Gedrin

Give 'em hell, Chris.

Mark, does Jurisprudence give you the Republican form of gov't?

Chris, don't let me forget about putting your refugee trigger into the med mod when I change it over.

For those of you looking at making extensive modifications to the game, a bit of advice...

I think that I added too much for the Med mod, making the game unstable at times. I feel fairly certain that it was all the advances I added that caused the main problem.
There may have been some trouble with the slic stuff as well, but I hope that the slic2 will be much more stable than its predecessor.
When the Actigrammers were explaining why they don't support more than 8 civs in the game, they said it was because the work the game had to do rose exponentionally with the number of civs. I think that something similar happens when you start adding new advances with all their preqs and so-forth.
The advances form the foundation that everything else is built upon, in that they determine what wonders, units, improvements, etc. that you can build.

quote: Originally posted by WesW on 11-14-2000 12:40 AM Mark, does Jurisprudence give you the Republican form of gov't?.

nope, Bereaucracy does(prereqs: Jurisprudence, Feudalism)

[Monkey]

Definitely the city graphics. I can't believe they didn't include new city styles. The first thing I'm going to do is load in Harlan's city graphics

[Hypocrite]

Yo, peeps, where can I get some of these mods you are referring to? Are they compatible with CTP II, or do you not know yet? Also, how will that affect LAN multi-player? Would everyone playing have to have the same mods installed, or would it render the game unplayable for MP all together? I imagine that a changed city graphics modification wouldn't cause much in the way of multi-player issues, but an altered tech-tree certainly might.

So let me know where I can get and read about mods for CTP and CTP II.

[Gedrin]

Sure Wes, you bet I'll give 'em hell.

As for the Med mod instability. You know, I think you might have something about the number of techs. See PS below.

As for my mod. Well I've never made it available since I'm a perfectionist and way to lazy to fix up the GL . And then CTPII was looming so I figured 'whatever'.

I'll make it available for CTPII though. My spreadsheets analysis is so extensively cross-referanced out the wazzoo now that I expect it will take no time to dump all CTPII numbers in.

I'm also working on a Babylon 5 scenario. Got the tech tree made too. Anyone recall the B5 scenario for CivII? When I heard of the MOD function in SLIC my mind just raced with all the cool things that could be done.

Gedrin
(aka Chris)

P.S. technical feel free to ignore:
You recall me mentioning that you may not have one tech be the prereq for more than 4 others?

Not having seen the code and being of the understanding it is written in C++, I assume that there is an array to store the 'post-reqs' (new word? ) Anyway in true C++ "here's the rope now go hang yourself" style it likely does arbitrary pointer arithmetic to dereferance those elements and goes off the end of the array, crashing horribly.

The number of techs is also likely in an array and I'll bet is also dereferanced via pointer arithmetic... cause it's really FAST!!! However I would expect the number of techs to be available would be some fn 2^x
I'll bet that if you have only 128 techs that do NOT contain the flag NO_INDEX then your instabilities will end.

Oh and of some importance is my point. Betcha CTPII is similar in this regard.
Generally if a tech only 'leads to new advances' and has only 1 pre or post req then it should be absorbed into another tech. I opt for tree minimization as opposed to maximization.

Hehe when do we get a CTPII creation forum?
[This message has been edited by Gedrin (edited November 14, 2000).]

[Yoleus]

On the tech-chart Fascism is just a step after Theology, in the middle of the Renaissance, before nationalism and before Democracy. Historically fascism is an industrial age militaristic mass control born as a consequence of nationalism and in opposition of communism, as far as I know. Maybe gameplay reasons suggested to shift it backword some centuries. What about the Fascist unit? Has it been scaled down?
You will have Musketeers and Fascists in the same age..
2 questions:
what do you all guys think of this?
Is it possible to modify the tech tree to place it "properly", maybe with communism and nationalism as prerequisites?
I await your opinions.

[Yoleus]

Another issue:
analysing the tech-chart it seems to me that the ultimate air units are the stealth fighter and bomber:
isn't this a little strange? Top air warfare technology for three centuries? I know that there is no space anymore, but I would have appreciated some stratosferic interceptors or orbital bombers (maybe just as bigger brothers of the stealth couple).
Again, waiting for your ideas and mod suggestions.

[Gedrin]

Yoleus; Yep I looked at that with suspicion too. But judgement must be suspended until the gov's are analysis is done.

However... seems you can build battleships... without the need for combustion engines. Ok mateys... ROW!!!

[Stratesford]

INTERNAL combustion engines, battleships don't use internal combustion engines. They use to work with coal and then diesel or kerosone and then with nuke power

[meriadoc]

Funny, I can't think of any battleships that use nuclear power. And aren't diesel engines considered to be internal combustion engines?

------------------
The Electronic Hobbit

[Pintello]

Hi Meriadoc,

"aren't diesel engines considered to be internal combustion engines?"

Depends on how you use them. In the case of really large ships like battleships fuel oil was used to heat a boiler that produced steam to turn the turbines that turned the propellers. Smaller ships like destoyers and submarines would use standard diesel engines, just on a larger scale.

You are probably correct though about nuclear powered battleships. I don't ever remember hearing of a nuclear powered battleship, unless the Soviets made one.

The battleships that the US used until a few years ago though, were left over from WW II. They were just very heavily modified over the intervening years. I believe all of them used fuel oil to heat boilers to produce steam to turn turbines as described above. If anyone knows otherwise, feel free to correct me and put the record straight.

Timothy Pintello

[Drakenred]

The USN did a series of design studies on powering variouse ships with Nuclear reactors, including what would have been a de facto Nuclear powered Batleship,(without the Gun armament, it would be more acurate to describe them as a 1950-70 "Arsenal ship" /Cruise misile launcher, however, I dont think they took the pojects mutch beyond the Design study phase, )

their were a few one-up designes of Batleships with internal combustion recipocating engin, but aparently for the most part the early ships were Considered experimental, becuase of actual and precived mantinnece problems(basicaly, its one thing to have to dismatle a destoyers engin, but to do simualr work on a BB would be a nightmare)

[Eternal]

It's tru, no one has or ever has had nuclear-powered battleships -Soviets never built such ships. We only still keep them around to drain what use we can out of them, because there's really no needing them in modern war.

[Slax]

Back to our regularly scheduled thread topic...

What I'd like to see in a CTP II mod is a 'fleshing out' of the time periods by addition of 4 or 5 technologies and units to each time period. Nothing crazy, just the addition of a few more options.

I felt originally that this may occur with the design of CTP II, but alas, the number of techs and units have not changed significantly.



------------------
Light the fuse!

[WesW]

Yeah, Ctp2 definitely needs more fleshing out in the unit and advance department, though we need to figure out how to add advances without causing the problems that occurred in the med mod.

[Gedrin]

While I am no expert on naval history and do not know about nuclear BB's I'd be really suprised.

The primary reason that subs went nuclear is so they do not need to surface for air. I doubt a BB needs the power of nuclear power and so the cost is not justified. BB's are just not big enough I think... they are not afterall super carriers.

Well I'm off to see if CTPII is at the local games shop.

Gedrin

[Locutus]

I agree, the Medieval and Industrial Age need to be put 'back' in and I also think that the Ancient Age should be split in two (as it is it covers almost 5000 of the 6300 years and even in the MedMod is was 4500 years, that can't possible be right).

I did some experimenting with the unit charts yesterday and could come up with slightly under 120 units that would be a minimum for a good representation of history (and I only used units for which there already exist sprites, either in CtPI (including mods) or CtPII).

The main problem of course is that the max number of advances in CtPI appears to be 128 (like Gedrin explained above), so if that holds for CtPII I'd have a big problem fitting all those in That, and I'm not convinced Activision will make the CtPI sprites available for us to use in CtPII

[heardie]

When I'lll get it I'll start on two things.
1. Underwater Scenario - Make use of the underwater units and exploit SLIC to the max. Dont have a story yet(post if you have an idea )
2. Gather a small team (or I'll do it by myself ) of people to write a guide on 'Creation for the Dummy' so all thsoe people with great ideas can actually implement them. Hoppefully this guide will kick ass and then it will end up on teh activison site

But I wont get teh game till it comes out in Oz so....

[TheLimey]

I'm considering adding some SLIC to destroy the slaver, when he's part of a winning stack; to simulate him (or them) transporting the slave(s) back to the appropriate city.

The slaver is bad in his unlimited form, because he allows the ultimate population increase blag; far worse than ICS in my opinion, and in fact makes ICS *MUCH WORSE*. You pay once, you put the slaver in a half decent attack stack, and keep attacking barbarians and the unwitting AI and gaining, the only 'cost' being his upkeep.

Getting one free pop for a slaver in my eyes is fair, not including the city slaving, which I believe is fair and works already, since it can be countered, and he has a chance of failing and being captured.

In game effects, making one combat capture per slaver unit will mitigate the unbalancing force that the slaver provides. This however has the possibility of making the anti-slavery units/wonders too cheap, so they should have their costs increased to balance.
[This message has been edited by TheLimey (edited November 16, 2000).]

[Gedrin]

Hey Limey.

You know you are right. I personally parked a Slaver in every city and led barbarians back with scouts... cost less support that way. I first thought having slave labour a seperate tech was superfluous but it does delay this tactic.

Wes: Note that (oh sorry, do you have it yet? Rub rub ) there is no index in the advances.txt structures. Could it be that advances are actually stored in a real linked list? Oh bliss... abstract data types Lovely concept, yipee!!!

Oh the upshot of that of course is infinite techs (within the physical constraints of available memory of course).

Gedrin

[Chris B]

I don't have the game yet but from what ive heard so far, one thing seemed better in CTP1.
As far as I can tell, CTP2 now ends in 2300 rather than 3000. Does anyone else besides me think that totally sucks, or is it supposed to be that way? Also, somebody clue me in. Did they really take out space cities, or is that just a rumor?

[Depp]

Been along time since I posted on Apolyton, back in CTP 1 days where we were tryiong to use SLIC for the first times.
Gonna try to do something useful with it this time as well, if they find it in their hearts to release some documentation.

Have they build any battleships since the nuclear drive first got installed in a sub ? Since carriers are the way to go Im not sure...

[WesW]

Well, as a member of the A-team, I have had a couple of early builds to look at for a few weeks now. However, it's not the same as the finished product.
For example, the current build I have is skewed to the point where getting the AIs to agree to any diplomatic proposals is almost impossible. Everything else seems to be in there, however.
I received a letter from Parker Davis yesterday where he said that he was going to send each member of the A-team a copy of the game as a reward for our help. So, it will be sometime next week before I get the game (assuming that their mail delivery system works this time- inside joke).

I am glad that the game seems to be receiving largely positive reviews so far.

I counted the advances and units listed in the Great Library, and noticed that they were not a multiple of 2. Any of you computer gurus want to comment on this?

Mark, have any of the Activisioners said whether or not they will be scanning the forums, especially this forum, in the coming weeks?

I would like to know the answer to Chris' question about the advances, and whether there are any limitations on other aspects of the game, or if there are 'optimal' ways of adding things versus other ways.
[This message has been edited by WesW (edited November 17, 2000).]

[Pintello]

Ha!!! I knew it Wes, you did have inside information!

By the way, who else was on the A-Team?

Timothy Pintello
[This message has been edited by Pintello (edited November 17, 2000).]