Armor changes

[skorpion59]

The whole object of the armor setting was to fix the 'Tank vs Phalanx' problem. However, if you will notice, every land unit's armor is the same, 1, through the whole game. Actually, a couple are different but you get the point. Water and air units are the only units which have different armor values. Now it seems to me, this would make more sense and work better if each AGE increased the armor value by 1, with corresponding increases to navy and air. So, I did just that. It definently makes a difference in battles and with needing to stay current with your military units. I haven't got far enough to know if it skews the end game yet though. Any comments, observations or pitfalls I should be on the watch for?

well, if the game ends when someone gets infantrymen, that might mean something. then again, someone might want that...

Colonel, i hope you realise that this way you will have to dramatically change the attributes for ALL the units.
Good luck though, and be sure to release your changes as a mod!
[This message has been edited by MarkG (edited December 11, 2000).]

[Colonel Kraken]

AGREED! I am currently in the process of doing just that. Thanks for the encouragement.

[Colonel Kraken]

Here are some web-sites people can go to to gain information about different types of units:

ANCIENT WARFARE: monolith.student.utwente.nl/~marsares/warfare/index.html

MEDIEVAL WARFARE: www.lepg.org/warfare.htm

GREEK PHALANX: www.rocky.edu/~behenr/phalanx.html

ROMAN EMPIRE: www.geocities.com/athens/oracle/6622/

PHALANX vs. LEGION: www.fordham.edu/halsall/ancient/polybius-maniple.html

SAMAURI-JAPANESE WARFARE: members.aol.com/kllrkatnas/sampaper.htm

LONGBOW-HISTORY OF: snt.student.utwente.nl/campus/sagi/artikel/longbow/longbow.html

GUNPOWDER WEAPONS HISTORY: www.silcom.com/~vikman/isles/scriptorium/firearm/firearm.html

[Celestial_Dawn]

Just weighing in on this unit balance thing.

I agree with Colonel Kraken, a man is a man is a man. Armour values for infantry should not change unless it is armoured infantry.

Their better weapons / training should be reflected in higher attack / defense / firepower values, nor armour.

Same approach I did for CtP1. Skorpion, if you simply increase the armour values indiscriminately, you're going to have to change the costs for every single one of those units. Remember, overall balance. Be careful what you are doing - otherwise whoever gets Infantrymen first can start taking fortified cities without Cannon. Which is ... very unrealistic.

[Harlan]

I'm surprised the armor values are all one now for land units. In the beta version of the game, ground units went from 1 to 3. If I remember correctly, Gunpowder based units were two, and actual armored units from Tank onwards were 3.

I'll bet they chickened out cos they were too worried about there being too great of a differential between players who get ahead in science and those who don't. Running away with the game is no fun, after all.

Just the same, I think having three levels from land units sounds just about right. But one should balance that by having lots of ways otherwise to play catch up.

Also, CD, I'm surprised to see you posting here. I thought you were pretty POed with the game after what happened with the alpha team. I hope you're not- the game still has lots of problems, but once Wes and other mods come out, I think it'll be really great.

[Colonel Kraken]

In regards to armor ratings, I think one should keep in mind that a man is still a man who can be killed just as easily if he holds a spear or handgun.

The armor ratings should, therefore, increase gradually and only when incredible strides have been made in warfare (e.g. the immense corps size units and new weaponry developed through the Napoleanic era --which would then obviate an inherrent increase in the defensive capabilities (i.e. armor rating) of that unit) or when a radical new unit comes out (e.g. tanks) that inherrantly provide an incredible amount of protection for the user, especially when facing previous era weaponry/units.

If you want to show increased effectiveness when a new unit comes out (but which is STILL a man with a weapon), significantly increase the attack and defense ratings of the unit.

For example, my Warrior has an attack and defense rating of 10. My Hoplite, however, I gave an attack rating of 20 and a defense rating of 30. The armor and firepower of both units, however, are still the same. This, to show the greatly increased effectiveness of the Greek Phalanx formation and weaponry.

Now, adding a legion to the game (which I've done) I made the attack rating 30 and left the defense at 30 but INCREASED the armor and firepower ratings to 2 to show the effects of the immense training, discipline, and tactics used by such units.

(I have been reading some doctoral dissertations on-line concerning the Legion vs. Phalanx, so these numbers seem appropriate from my readings. I would post the web addresses, but I don't have the information with me at the moment)

[Celestial_Dawn]

Harlan

Ummmmm, I was originally POed, but that changed after the initial venting. Plus, if you remember, my actual resignation post was actually quite mild ... I never went to see if it got any replies (out of principle - resignation is a resignation) so I don't know how well it was received.

There were a couple of reasons for my toning down - not least was the private email exchange we both had where you explained to me that you did believe that the CtP2 team is doing the best they can given their limited resources. I trusted (and still trust) your integrity, so what you tell me always goes a long way.

Anyway, I left kind of not mad, but more disillusioned than anything else - the engine, the customisability of CtP2 is just so beautiful, why do they have to again release an unpolished game out-of-the-box, despite the huge negative response CtP1 got ...

I felt kind of sad actually, since it was obvious that my faith that Activision would do the right thing the second time round had been badly misplaced. Plus you know how badly the "alpha test" was handled ... expectation of input created when really it was more a "comment on finished product" stage.

Well, to be fair - quite a few of my suggestions got through. Streamlined launcher, toggable CP/minimap. Plus they fixed the crazy income from trade goods. But so many other things ... the balance ... it is not quite there ...

Very sad all this, but not something you can directly blame actual production team for. Give them small budget, understaff them, overwork programmers, make marketing budget 3x production budget, also force unrealistic schedules (given the production budget) - makes it look more like a rip-off sweatshop than serious game company.

So I then realised that getting mad at the production team is kind of pointless (unlike CtP1, where you actually have clueless lead designers like William Westwater), since they don't really control budget and release schedules .

It is a decision made by marketing and management, so the only way we can directly influence them is talk to them in the only language they can understand, by not buying their product.

So I didn't buy it. But I'm not going to go around telling others not to buy it either - the final product, apart from balance and the message queue is actually quite nice. If you have not bought CtP1 before, CtP2 is actually quite a good buy ...

Anyway, I'm here. You could say I have a vested interest - I want to see how brilliantly the game can shine after it has been lovingly tended by the hands of a master gemcutter. Plus modification can be pretty fun. I would like to do mod CtP2 actually, I just don't have a lot of time.

So no, I'm not POed. But at this stage, I don't know yet what my level of involvement will be.

In any case, modification is in both yours and WesW's capable hands, so I do agree yes - post-mod, CtP2 will truly rock, especially now that it has borders.

But first, fix fix fix!
[This message has been edited by Celestial_Dawn (edited December 12, 2000).]

quote: Originally posted by Celestial_Dawn on 12-12-2000 01:27 AM Plus they fixed the crazy income from trade goods

aargh! actually now the significance of trade is quite small...

[skorpion59]

Thanks all for the input, it is appreciated. After reading and evaluating, I tend to lean towards what Harlan said. Cut down on the increases to about 3 to see what happens.

I don't disagree on these issues, changing attack, defense, etc, but my point was to use the mechanism which Activision origianlly put in to fix the game, Armor. Possibly it skewed the game so bad they had to remove it. That is what I want to find out.

Anyways, if anything positive comes out of my testing, I will pass it along.

BTW, CD, the beta site is still up and available and you still have access.

[phenyl]

wow..

in the interest of those who have just got into the scene, it seems that there is alot of behind the scenes history going on. i am just curious as to how "official" or "related" the involvement here on apolyton is with activision. i mean, the activision page links directly here!!! in short, do you guys work for activision or what? not that it really matters, but access to the beta's (ie potential changes and things already addressed and abandonded for whatever reason) etc is relevant. i know that keeping track of this would be a pain, but its sort of like talking to the wizard of oz sometimes...

all of you have made good, playable mods, but it seems that to enter this from the outside would be very difficult to say the least. combiming/editing mod packs is nearly impossible with the different versions/ releasese, etc... if this is the development team in the "outside world" then it changes the scope of the forums a bit. i read the gold release chat and didnt recognize too many names except for wesw showing up late...


i personally have been following/leeching/playing ctp1 and the mod's for the last year or so and all of you guys have been making from the perspective of the layman game player. the one thing i have seen that is missing is an easy and flexible system to choose mods to incorporate.

this should be another thread i know, but instead of dickering over tweaks, or taking one set wholesale a way of taking a group of related tweaks (ie maybe tech tree / unit stats of one person with the terrain values / trade goods of another) and combining them would be good. also, this way if one creator wanted to revise their mods at a later date, everyone else wouldnt have to choose between ignoring the new mods and re-packing them into their own combination mod.. ?

----------------

re: armor? i have to bring up the point about individual units again. colonel kraken seems to have a grasp on the ancient units, but re: ww2. (panzer general woo hoo! )

combined arms tactics (a potential advance) make a combination of infantry / armor / artillery / recon and organic support much more effective than say 4 of one type. this theory has dominated the whole of land and naval modern warfare.

what i am getting at is that the simplified approach that the combat resolution system has taken makes it a bit hard to compare an army of any group of homegenous units to a more balanced army of the same size.

anyway, who knows how the futuristic units will/should work!? we have to think in the scope of the game; ie the current point in the game's timeline, the combinations of forces and even potential for upgrades would have to be considered when setting armor ratings.

i know that some of this isnt incorporated just yet, but if we are trying to realisitcally model combat thats one thing. it is another to make a playable and balanced game.

just my 2 cents.




[This message has been edited by phenyl (edited December 12, 2000).]
[This message has been edited by phenyl (edited December 12, 2000).]

[Celestial_Dawn]

quote: Originally posted by skorpion59 on 12-12-2000 01:08 PM BTW, CD, the beta site is still up and available and you still have access.

Thanks skorpion, but I think I'll stay away, out of principle. (not the I-hate-activision-marketing principle, rather the I-resigned-therefore-should-stick-to-my-word principle)

MarkG:

Yeah, trade's kinda small, but I find I have too much money anyway Even on Impossible.

I've found though that early sea exploration uncovering far cities really increases trade income. Only problem - damn AI pirates.

[marc420]

Probably way too late, but there was a very good idea here...... some sort of system to allow the player to easily chose which mod to play.

I haven't done much with it yet, besides try to tweak the AI time settings. But it seems the only way to install a mod is to replace a bunch of txt files.

A better idea would be a directory system. Perhaps a directory called something like "Gamedata" and under that the install would put one folder called "Default". In this would be the two folders for AI data and Gamevalues data.

But then a player could put other Directories alongside the "Default" directory. And the game could be taught that if it sees more than one directory here it would prompt the player on which set of settings he wishes to play.

This would aid players who want to download various mods and try them out. And it would also aid people wanting to create a Mod, because they could just copy the "Default" data (or another mod) to another directory, and then start to adjust from there. That would be nice for wanting to tweak some settings and try it out from there.

Probably way to late to get this into the program now. Unless someone working on a patch reads this and sees an easy way to do it. But I suspect this would be a big change to the program and need a lot of testing to make sure the program finds the right files at all times. Too bad.... maybe for "CTP3, The Call to Cash"?

[Paul]

Marc420, you can already put mods in their own directories. Look at the directory structures for the scenarios that came with the game. You can similarly create directories for your own scenarios and mods.

[phenyl]

paul,

that is the whole idea of scenarios for sure, but the implementation so far has been sketchy at best. esp if you are looking to combine elements of differents mods together!

somewhere else in the forums skorpion wrote :

, right about here is where I would normally be saying, it is time for somebody to create a WW2 scenario. However, I don't think that is possible anymore. The people that know me, know I am an avid CtP supporter. With that said, I now have to say, Activision screwed this one up big time. Not being able to create scenarios is much worse than the MP problems. I mean, CtP1 did scenarios better than CtP2 and that was one of the biggest gripes surrounding CtP1, lack of scenario support.
-------------------------

so call to cash might be neccessary. i think that an outside utility, like the easy mod utility for ctp, might be neccessary. of course this might very well demand that the mod makers agree on some sort of pre set formatting when they release their mods if they want them to work together.

the way the mod community supported ctp was really good, but it also made users do things like installing the REAL way to play civ like it way for cdawn's apolyton pack with activion's patch and ctpfan's 1.21 hack neccessary. (this was just to illustrate a point) and then making some very precise (admittedly simple) modifications to the games text source files themselves!!!!

throught the development everyone seemed to be content to base their mod's areound cdawn's first one, BUT what if he wanted to release a 6.0 version or something. it would invalidate all the work that went after it.

see my point? of one person is going to be the "leader" of the mod scene, that is great. but so many people have so many good ideas and are all pretty much starting from scratch because of the way ctp1 was itself upgraded to ctp2 it is going to make some wierd issues when the work comes to fruit.

either people REALLY have to work together and everyone compromise / find the single best answer, or there is going to be cross development like CRAXY. i have brought this up and no one seems to be biting on it.

anyway, i dont really have an answer, except that scenario's arent the real answer to using and installng mods,

[Harlan]

Lots of interesting comments in this thread. First off, I'm glad to hear CD that you're still with us. I hope you'll use this game to be properly balanced, hopefully in conjunction with Wes so we can have one standard mod that others can be based off of.

Phenyl,
Yes, behind the scenes lies a tangled tale. In brief, about a dozen people who had made mods for CTP1 were invited to be a special alpha team for CTP2. They weren't the only alpha or beta testers by any means- Activision had lots of others including an in house team. But it was thought by including this group, people could get started on their mods early and push for changes to help their mods, so the game could hit the ground running when it was released. In addition Scorpion and I were asked to make scenarios to be shipped with the game, and to be paid for doing so. Scorpion had to drop out of that aspect for health reasons, I ended up making the Alexander scenario.

So far, so good. But in actual practice there were big problems. It was decided early on that this team couldn't get copies of the game builds by FTP because of security concerns- only Scorpion and I could get them that way. So everyone else was going to have them shipped. That was a HUGE problem. Between the time the game was supposedly shipped overnight and people got the game, many weeks went by. People got really pissed off. To make it worse, one person did get sent the build fairly fast, but noone else. So every day for weeks, people were expecting to get the build in their mail any day. By the time people did actually get that build, it was already way out of date and so comments about bugs and so forth were possibly irrelevant. It was also such an early build that it was hardly working and not much help for making mods since the official game files were all likely to change later. There was no other build sent to the team until the game came out, and then everyone got a free copy of the game.

That's it in a nutshell, though I could go into more sordid details (but I'd rather not!). Basically it was a good idea, but Activision didn't have the time or resources to follow it through. One thing we all learned is that Activision's CTP2 team was well meaning, but seriously understaffed and at tne mercy of poor decisions by higher ups. For instance, not long before the game came out, I'm told they were encouraged to get rid of scenarios altogether, because it was felt they complicated things too much. Luckily they resisted that. The higher ups were also the ones who vetoed the plan to have builds FTPed, which would have made this alpha team a success story I think.

I have a slightly happier tale to tell, personally. Making an official scenario I got lots of help and feedback. Virtually all the SLIC coding for the scenario was done by someone within Activision, as that person implemented my ideas. I also was able to make a number of suggestions for the game that got listened to, since I had updated builds at all times.

Generally speaking, I think that despite the problems the process had, at least you could say they tried, which is much better than most game companies, such as Microprose which virtually had no feedback with Civ2 products, ever.

One last comment on another posting here. It was said that making scenarios is impossible. As I posted somewhere else, there is a bug with placing cities, thus making scenarios impossible now, but I've been promised by someone within Activision that will be fixed in the first patch. The thing about the human player only allowed to be the first player. I agree that is a big problem. And based on my experience with Activision programmers, that will be dealt with if there is a big enough demand for it. If just one or two people gripe about it in Creation forum postings that Activision folks may not even be reading, don't expect much on that in a patch. Its certainly something they may not realize is a big problem. If you get an e-petition of scenario makers taking a stand on that and send that off, I think it would be a shoo in to be fixed. I would say that's true for other issues that need to be fixed as well. Since Activision is so understaffed, they can't fix everything that should be fixed, and they do listen to people here. So its just a question of speaking with a loud voice and making priorities.

[skorpion59]

Phenyl,

My fault, that statement was too general. I assumed the people that were interested in scenarios had been following the various threads and knew what I was referring to. The idea and implementation of scenarios (directory setup, etc) works fine. It is the type of scenario which doesn't work right. If you want a basic 8 player scenario with no pre-existing items (units, cities), it works quite well. However, if you want a REAL scenario which starts out in the middle of a massive war for instance, it doesn't work at all.

In therory, I like your idea of being able to put mods together. In reality, it is just not possible. How would you incorporate 2 mods which alter the same file with 2 different settings? Or what if one mod altered the setting and the other mod removed the setting altogether. And that is just the tip of the iceberg, it goes much deeper. How would you then know what other files were changed, based on the aformentioned settings, and will have to also be changed. A basic program wouldn't be able to address this and combine them correctly. It simply requires a human to interprete this information and figure out what needs to be done.