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Mark_Everson
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Canton, MI
Jan 1970
time: 00:21
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Clash Demo 7.2 Features and Tips
Demo 7.2 has several new features in the military and economic areas, and also some GUI tweaks and bug fixes. I'll give a brief list of what's new here, followed by a more detailed list of what the new features and GUI changes are. At the bottom I'll put a link so you can download the Demo 7.2 jar file.
Features:
Fortification and Siege Model
Naval Combat
Militia that automatically forms in a square to fight off invaders
Economic Specials (Gold, Cloth, Tin, Salt)
Merchants that automatically trade in these goods and others
Jericho Scenario AI Improvements and "ladder" of difficulty
GUI changes:
More-streamlined movement interface
Economic orders panel comes up alone, econ info available via a button
tweaks to increase clarity on change province capital menu
Bug Fixes:
teleporting units and settlers
intermittent crashes when econ windows left open
Some more details...
1. Fortification and Siege Model
The demo has a first implementation of a fairly-detailed model of fortifications and sieges. One of Clash's goals is to have more-realistic outcomes in warfare and other areas. Walls give the defender a decided advantage, but can be overcome either by siege weapons or a significant manpower advantage of the attacker (numerical advantage needed increases with wall strength). Play the new SiegeWars scenario to see it in action! You can now build your own fortifications using the "Wall" button on the toolbar, and pay for the build similar to how you do for building roads. You can read more about walls and combat involving them in the Fortifications and Sieges thread.
2. Naval Combat
We've now got a naval combat model that allows for fleet battles. One fleet from each side is near the "toe" of Italy in the delenda scenario if you want to fight a quick naval combat. This will get a lot more exciting when the AI knows how to use naval power, hopefully in demo 8! For now, ships that are caught in port fight as low-value land units, and are usually destroyed unless their side has land superiority.
3. Militia that automatically forms in a square to fight off invaders
Your whole city of people won't just sit there like spineless wimps to be taken over by a few old arthritic soldiers anymore! If the relatively poor combat potential of a local militia could turn the tide of battle, the people will join in! At least, if they like you better than the other guys  . If militia units were active in a combat, you'll be notified of it in the detailed combat report.
4. Economic Specials (Gold, Cloth, Tin, Salt)
Specials are scarce "strategic" resources that are found locally (gold, tin, salt), or specialty finished goods that can best be produced where the primary resources are (cloth). The people in your economy automatically use these locally as needed, and merchants can also redistribute these goods to wherever is most willing to pay for them! For now we only have special commodities in the delenda scenario. You can read more about special commodities and are future plans for them on the Economy page of the Clash web site. Actually, both specials and merchants were already in Demo 6, but hadn't made it back into Demo 7 until now.
5. Merchants that automatically trade in these goods and others
In accord with Clash's low-micromanagement philosophy, merchants automatically search the world for good trade deals. These can be involve any type of good, but frequently at least one leg of the trade involves a special commodity. That is because specials have a value that varies depending on whether they are locally available or not. The specials I have in so far, and the basic good they convert to are: Gold -> Services ; Tin -> Resources ; Cloth -> Manufactured Goods ; Salt -> Food
6. More-streamlined movement interface
We got several requests for improving the movement interface so that it involved fewer clicks, and provided a way to cancel the last move segment. When you are in move mode you can now exit by either hitting End Move, as before, or double-clicking on the last selected square for the move. This works even for single-square moves, just double-click the square you want to move to after entering move mode. If you make a mistake while entering moves, a right-click will delete the last movement segment. There is also a movement option we're testing that doesn't use the move button at all. If you want to enter a simple order to move to a square, you can select a TF in the Units Box and then double-click on the square where you want the TF to go. This should show a movement path as normal. If it doesn't (there are still some bugs in this approach) just enter the move normally.
7. Jericho Scenario AI Improvements and "ladder" of difficulty
In response to several comments on the Jericho AI, we have made a few simple changes. (Major changes will have to wait until the real AI gets going.) The results are that Jericho as Jericho is now even tougher to win. We'll see who's first to win it! There is also now a clear ladder of difficulty with the civs at the bottom of the choice screen being very easy to win with, and with the challenge increasing noticeably from the middle of the list on up. We have also made technological progress more achievable in the scenario, although it is still fairly slow.
Finally, we added a credits screen so that all the people who have contributed to the demo can be recognized. I'll append the list here so everyone can get credit for their hard work! My sincere thanks to everyone who helped to bring this and our previous demos to life! 
Clash of Civilizations Demo 7.2 Credits
Coders:
Gary Thomas (Map, Technology, and Much Else)
Laurent Di Cesare (Military Plus)
Mark Everson (Economics Plus)
Alex Zuroff (Overview Map)
Vovan Sim (Bug fixing)
Artists:
sas [Stian Stokken] (Terrain)
Fiera [Juan Gonzalez] (Units and Cities)
Model Design:
Military - Paul Krenske, Laurent Di Cesare, Gary Thomas
Technology - Richard Bruns, Lord God Jinnai [Leejay Lockhart]
Economy - Mark Everson
Government (partially implemented) - Rodrigo Quijada
Scenario and Tutorial Design:
Gary Thomas, Mark Everson, Laurent Di Cesare, Dale [Kent]
Tips:
Play the Dawn Tutorial Scenario First if you're new to Demo 7. It has a wealth of info about the GUI and game mechanics. Questions about issues that are clearly explained in the tutorial will be met with: PTFT! (like RTFM)
1. You shouldn't play Attila unless you have a fast computer or are patient. It can run quite slowly on older computers. We are looking into fixing that.
2. At present you can't get the win notification in the Delenda or Jericho scenarios. So don't expect a victory message!
3. In the Dawn tutorial scenario you'll frequently need to run five to ten turns after achieving all the objectives before you see the victory message. As before, the Dawn tutorial is the first thing you should play!
The Team really wants to hear what you think about the Demo! Comments and criticisms are solicited. Before you type a lot of detailed comments, you might want to check and see which are already in the bug or feature requests lists near the top of this thread.
Download Demo 7.2!
[edit, change link]
Last edited by Mark_Everson on 10-01-2003 at 01:32
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Martin the Dane
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Aarhus, Denmark
Feb 2000
time: 06:21
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Let me start with the positive comments.
First I like the naval combat, so that I can now eradicate the Cartahanians, allmost.
The resources are a nice addon, but it's hard to figure out what impace they have in the game. Some indication on the amount produced/nedded/used would help. Furthermore if resouces have strategic value, they are worth fighting for.
Now to the less positive things:
Well I have said it befor but I'll say it again, the numbers in the econ overview for walls, roads, technology, etc. makes no sence.
The walls/siege thing doesn't work for strong defenders. A relative weak army can wear down a much stronger defender, by not using siege weaponds. It's slow, but eventually the attacker will win.
The naval combat needs a beach assult for troops carried on ships, so that it is possible to take single square ilands, held by troops.
And it is not particular realistic for two armies to pass each other with only light skirmishes. I have in several games had to chase a weak TF around the map, because he sliped throug my army. Another related isue is that I have often attacked a square with a lage army, only to se the enemy move around my forces. (eg. I atack to the NW, while the enemy moves S ending up at the square to the West of where my army was)
When right-clicking to cancel roadbuilding the change capital menu comes up.
Why not let all the relevant options apear on that right-click-menu.
Wall building is not particular logical. First you click the Wall button, then you click on the square where you want the wall to apear, but nothing seems to happend, no indication whether or not the wall will be built, the only way to find out is to wait and see. And I have tried to build walls without success several times. Normally you will build only one wall, so why not let the buton stay down untill you have placed the wall and then go back up.
Furthermore the build wall button should be grayed out when no wall building is available.
Finaly I'd like to se some sort of entrechment option for troops. The Romans built fortifications around their camps at night.
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Mark_Everson
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Canton, MI
Jan 1970
time: 00:21
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Hi Martin, thanks for the list of thoughts, observations, and bugs.
quote:
Originally posted by Martin the Dane
The resources are a nice addon, but it's hard to figure out what impace they have in the game. Some indication on the amount produced/nedded/used would help. Furthermore if resouces have strategic value, they are worth fighting for. |
The specials do have a large value to the economy which you can see from the brief merchant report. They can easily increase your economic output by 10 to 20%. However, as of now they are not required to build specific units. We will try to tie them in more strongly to the game strategy in the next demo. If you would like to read over the bit on specials and make suggestions in the Econ thread, that would be great.
quote:
Well I have said it befor but I'll say it again, the numbers in the econ overview for walls, roads, technology, etc. makes no sence. |
I agree, but it will need to wait for the new econ interface. Although, I could make a patch suitable for being more meaningful on roads, walls, and perhaps a few other things. To you think this would be very valuable? Do remember that road segments on different types of terrain cost varying amounts, so if the econ interface were to show "roadbuilding units" it would have to be to some standard like for a road segment on flat terrain.
quote:
The walls/siege thing doesn't work for strong defenders. A relative weak army can wear down a much stronger defender, by not using siege weaponds. It's slow, but eventually the attacker will win. |
Yeah, that's pretty bad... we didn't think through all the details in the model. And there are some things we knew weren't great but to do them right at first would have taken too long. I see that you have already put some of these issues in the Fortifications and Sieges thread. We can discuss all the proposed changes there so that we can get an improved model ready for the next demo.
quote:
The naval combat needs a beach assult for troops carried on ships, so that it is possible to take single square ilands, held by troops. |
I'll put this in the feature list, but it doesn't seem critical at this point.
quote:
And it is not particular realistic for two armies to pass each other with only light skirmishes. I have in several games had to chase a weak TF around the map, because he sliped throug my army. Another related isue is that I have often attacked a square with a lage army, only to se the enemy move around my forces. (eg. I atack to the NW, while the enemy moves S ending up at the square to the West of where my army was) |
These are good points, can you bring them up in the most recent Military thread? The first one we could probably make a design change right away. The reason we don't do the second one is we would need to have some pursuit AI which is not available yet. We would also need some special orders. You don't necessarily want your army pursuing another to the ends of the earth .
quote:
When right-clicking to cancel roadbuilding the change capital menu comes up.
Why not let all the relevant options apear on that right-click-menu. |
I think this one is already in the bug list. The reason we don't want to let everything appear on our right click menu is that there is a specific Road-building mode, and in that the left click is supposed to cancel just the last road segment. This is much better functionality than having to pick from a wide range of left-click options IMO. The implementation is there to do it right now, and it was working at one point, it's just it got broken and we haven't fixed it yet. I imagine we will have a bug-fix release out fairly shortly. Vovan has already fixed a few of the outstanding bugs.
quote:
Wall building is not particular logical. First you click the Wall button, then you click on the square where you want the wall to apear, but nothing seems to happend, no indication whether or not the wall will be built, the only way to find out is to wait and see. |
Actually, this is not the way it works. First you select the square you intend to build walls in. Then you press the Wall button and select the type of walls. We do know the interface needs work to give the player feedback.
quote:
Finaly I'd like to se some sort of entrechment option for troops. The Romans built fortifications around their camps at night. |
We have discussed that before, but it's not implemented yet. You could put a reminder in the military thread, and we could work out a spec and see if Laurent would implemented it. Mostly it is the interface difficulties that I think are the problem. But an order given to a unit that is just sitting in a square might be doable with the current interface.
quote:
Oh, and a note about the gui: D7.1 remembered the windows possitions from game to game, D7.2 saves them, but doesn't use them.
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That feature broke very late, just before the release. Thanks for letting us know! We will fix it up soon.
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LDiCesare
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La Ferté sous Jouarre France
Jan 2001
time: 05:21
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One point Mark wanted me to precise:
The best scenario to check for militia is SiegeWars. It
has been made to test both sieges and militia.
You can have militia fighting for men in Minas Tirith if
the opposing chariot attacks immediately (maybe move some of your armies northwest to be sure you don't overwhelm the chariot). You can also have militia fighting in most squares of the bridge, for either side, and in Minas Morgul, for either side (I once
won thanks to human militia there).You will sometimes get some militia fighting at Mordor for the goblins.
About walls:
The walls in Delenda (and all other scenarii except Siegewars if you build them) are pretty useless because of their low defense value. They limit the damage but don't help a lot. Those in SiegeWars are much stronger. You can compare both scenarios and say if the behaviour in SiegeWars is correct for you (I made it so you shouldn't be able to win without building siege weapons - if you can I will have to tune things).
I thought of greying the button when no walls were available and should do it. I also thought I needed an image to give feedback for wallbuilding but had no idea what to draw.
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LDiCesare
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La Ferté sous Jouarre France
Jan 2001
time: 05:21
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I updates the code so you can see walls that are being built and increased the walls defense value. The second part can be done if you open the .jar with winzip for instance and in military.xml, with a text editor, change the Wall defense value from 25 to something else (like 100 to get a big boost).
I am not really happy with my wall being built image. I could think of nothing nice (tried a palissade being built but it didn't work), so anyone with ideas or drawing skills is welcome. Here is what I use:
 Attachment: wallbuilding.gif
This has been downloaded 156 time(s).
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Martin the Dane
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Aarhus, Denmark
Feb 2000
time: 06:21
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quote:
quote:
When right-clicking to cancel roadbuilding the change capital menu comes up.
Why not let all the relevant options apear on that right-click-menu. |
These were meant to be two seperate isues. Guess it should have been:
Why not let all the relevant options apear on that right-click-menu, when not in movement or building mode.
So Mark I mostly agree with you on that as it is.
What I was thinking of was when you rightclick a province the menu would also display the Province and Civ Econ butons, etc.
quote:
Although, I could make a patch suitable for being more meaningful on roads, walls, and perhaps a few other things. To you think this would be very valuable? Do remember that road segments on different types of terrain cost varying amounts, so if the econ interface were to show "roadbuilding units" it would have to be to some standard like for a road segment on flat terrain. |
Well if the units were some standard buildpoints, and the road or wall being built would show number of buildpoints needed to complete it, in some relevant display, maybe in the details view.
quote:
The specials do have a large value to the economy which you can see from the brief merchant report. They can easily increase your economic output by 10 to 20%. |
Well then I guess I figured it out anyway. Just thought that this could not be it. I'm looking forward to when they will be required for unit building.
Then to the walls issue:
From LD's comment I can se that the walls are not fully implemented in the Delenda scenario. In the Lord of the Rings scenario my attacker takes heavy casulties while in Rome in Delenda the sieges take much longer time, with virtually no losses on either side. Would increasing wall strength make the atacker take more damage?
I guess this belongs in the walls/siege thread so I'll continue there at some point in the near future.
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LFS
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A featue I think is missing is the ability to toggle the view of categories of items - e.g toggle viewing units so that you can better see what else is on the map (like roads).
I havn't looked hard at our graphics code,but this generally fairly easy to do so long as each thing being toggled is a separate image.
I had a go at the attilla scenario - and didnt get to see turn one finish, this isn't due to lack of machine resources, none were being used (no cpu or memory usage worth noting) It looks to me that there is a bug in the scenario, or a general bug that more often manifests in that scenario?
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LDiCesare
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La Ferté sous Jouarre France
Jan 2001
time: 05:21
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quote:
Another gui thing that's missing is scrollbars. Especially on the economics screen and TF-Details window. |
Yes that's why you have a crappy reorder button in the econ windows. The whole econ UI badly wants recoding (unless you love spreadsheets).
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LFS
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I've already put in a fix for the TF-overview detail thing, to stop the combat summary data being squashed at the top - using scroll bars if needed.
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Martin the Dane
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Aarhus, Denmark
Feb 2000
time: 06:21
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Hey I can't even complain befor you guys have fixed the problem lol.
Laurent: I am a fan of spreadsheets. They are logical, they give you a nice overview, they telle you what you need to know, etc.. But I'm not so fond of the way they are implemented here, all-thogh it's far from the worst I've seen. An option to hide/show variouse parts would be nice. What about a treestructure? A thought just occured to me,  if the variouse elements in the econ view are grouped in a colabsible structure, it would be possible to link this into reducing micromanagement.
Let me give an example:
If all military units were grouped under say Military, you could alocate a certain percentage to military, and the AI would then spend the alocated resources as it saw fit.
Same for infrastructure, technology, production etc.
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LDiCesare
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La Ferté sous Jouarre France
Jan 2001
time: 05:21
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Yes the tree structure is what we want. If you delve somewhere deep in the forum, there is an Econ GUI thread. I am too lazy to look for it now, but the idea was the same as yours. I think there are also some images, but it is not being coded now for lack of manpower.
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Mark_Everson
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Canton, MI
Jan 1970
time: 00:21
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Clash Demo 7.2.1 is primarily a bug-fix release. Due to a lot of effort from the coding team, especially our two new programmers Vovan and LFS, we have been able to fix a good number of bugs in a short period of time. Those bug fixes, and a few new small feature implemetations made it worth releasing another version of Demo 7.2 so early. Here's what has changed:
1. Fix for road build delete. Right-click while in road mode now deletes the roads in the square clicked, rather than the last road segment. That gives the player fine control over which road segments to kill.
2. We updated the code for wall building. You will know build walls very similar to roads. Push the "Wall" button, select the type of wall from the box (there is only one type for now) and then click on any squares that you want to enclose with walls. The squares where walls are selected will show walls that are planned to be built. The wall-building image is blue because planned roads are blue too. We also increased the wall value in military.xml (4 times) so they are more effective. They are still far from as strong as those in the SiegeWars scenario, however.
3. Fixed the settings file bug, where the settings for window positions weren't carried over from game to game.
4. Bug number 153 - Next TF doesn’t automatically move the map so the
selected TF is visible. The next TF button now selects the next TF, and centers the
view on it.
5. Got rid of several bugs that prevented the Attila scenario from running more than one turn. It is still slow, but now it runs ok.
There were also several other bug fixes and minor tweaks.
Thanks for all the bug reports playtesters! We will continue to fix the most critical ones promptly, and handle the others as time allows. As usual, please let us know about any new bugs or feature requests.
-Mark
You can Download D7.2.1 Here.
If this is your first demo, read the Download instructions, but still use the file from the "Download D7.2.1" link!
[edit, remedial typing to help Mark tell left from right ]
Last edited by Mark_Everson on 14-01-2003 at 17:47
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LFS
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quote:
1. Fix for road build delete. Left-click while in road mode now deletes the roads in the square clicked, rather than the last road segment. That gives the player fine control over which road segments to kill. |
should be right click not left click (left click lays roads)
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TheCid
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Canada
Jul 2002
time: 00:21
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About annexing territory:
I believe that when having a unit go over a territory should not be enough to keep it in the long term. As things stand now, each tile that a unit goes over, becomes his nation's and as a result, the resources produced benefit its own population. However, in reality, when a raiding army goes through a land (like Hannibal for instance), as soon as he's far enough... the resources (and tile ownership from the game perspective) would revert to the original owner's.
I believe that to keep a territory, we need to keep a military presence within some distance (say 2 tiles) otherwise the tile should automatically revert to original owner's until such a time as the population of the tile has switched allegiance to the new civ. This way, in the Hannibal scenario, Hannibal would only control as much territory as was near his army. No take away all the resource-generating squares from the romans just by having walked on them.
On the other hand, I just love how colonization works, where we can send troops in to escord inhabitants and carry them elsewhere. This more realistically depicts some itnentional colonization of territories, where for instance, rome would settled conquered land with loyal citizens to speed-up their assimilation. Similarly, the population of newly conquered lands, has been frequently disseminated throughout empires for the same purpose... and raids have been made on other nations' lands to seize people to use as slaves. It give a whole lot of realism to Clash, I think.
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Richard Bruns
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NC, USA
Nov 1999
time: 06:21
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Am I the only one who gets totally slaughtered in the Dawn tutorial? I do what they they me to do, getting wheat and horses and making that colony. I fend off two smaller barbarians form the south but then a huge barbarian army comes from the north and wipes me out.
I played the Jericho scenario as the third town and found it incredibly easy to take over the map. Everything was basically undefended, as they were all off attacking Jericho. There seemed to be a bug, though. I was informed about all combats that involved the Jericho civ, even though I had no way of seeing what was happening down there.
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vovan
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quote:
Originally posted by Richard Bruns
Am I the only one who gets totally slaughtered in the Dawn tutorial? I do what they they me to do, getting wheat and horses and making that colony. I fend off two smaller barbarians form the south but then a huge barbarian army comes from the north and wipes me out.
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No, Richard, you are not the only one. It is funny, I have yet to win the tutorial, even though I was able to win the other scenarios.
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LDiCesare
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La Ferté sous Jouarre France
Jan 2001
time: 05:21
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quote:
There seemed to be a bug, though. I was informed about all combats that involved the Jericho civ, even though I had no way of seeing what was happening down there. |
My fault. I disabled the check to show only those which interested you because they were even more buggy (if your unit had left the square, you didn't see the report, that included if you had been wiped out).
I manage to win Dawn, but that is not always easy. Sometimes, I get wiped out, but the scenario remains possible to win, though maybe harder than it used to be.
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Richard Bruns
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NC, USA
Nov 1999
time: 06:21
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I still can´t win the tutorial. They come whether or not I dicover horses, and they have the attack strength of about eight warriors. I wouldn´t be able to fight them off unless I had been building warriors the entire time. Finding horses obviously doesn´t work either, since I can´t raise the tech high enough to build chariots in time. When I tried to uproot my population and run, they hunted me down and wiped me out.
Tutorials are not supposed to be this hard. The point is that winning should be guaranteed if you follow the instructions. By contrast, winning SiegeWars was quite easy. I do like the way that the siege took so long, even though I had a vastly superior force.
A few more comments:
I can always get the game to run no matter where it is on the computer, so you might want to get rid of that notice saying it has to be on the desktop.
The market economy seems buggy. I switched to it on the first turn in Dawn and got some "interesting" results. At one point the wages for the production sector were -3.44. Were the people paying the government for the privilege to work? It also led to insane amounts of growth compared to the traditional economy, 239.4 percent in one case. I think this was related to the expansion into a new square; things settled down after a while but wages were negative for quite some time. Een on turn 12, wages in the production sector were 0.04 and wages in the service sector were 6.52, even though the price of production was higher than both food and resources.
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Mark_Everson
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Canton, MI
Jan 1970
time: 00:21
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quote:
Originally posted by Richard Bruns
I still can´t win the tutorial. They come whether or not I dicover horses, and they have the attack strength of about eight warriors. I wouldn´t be able to fight them off unless I had been building warriors the entire time. Finding horses obviously doesn´t work either, since I can´t raise the tech high enough to build chariots in time. When I tried to uproot my population and run, they hunted me down and wiped me out. |
Thanks for the report Richard. I've verified that it's as bad as reported. . . As you say there are Serious problems  I don't know what happened, but my guess is somehow the big barb event stuff got changed accidentally when I edited the scenario last, or a bug creapt into the event stuff. It is sufficiently serious that I'll make it my top mod priority to get a fix out. Unfortunately I've only got a few hour to work this weekend, so a fix may have to wait till early next week. BTW if you want to take a shot at changing the scenario file, in principle you could do it yourself. Just edit delenda.xml.
quote:
Tutorials are not supposed to be this hard. The point is that winning should be guaranteed if you follow the instructions. |
Well, it wasn't intended to be that way. . .
A few more comments:
quote:
I can always get the game to run no matter where it is on the computer, so you might want to get rid of that notice saying it has to be on the desktop. |
Thanks, that's useful info.
quote:
The market economy seems buggy. I switched to it on the first turn in Dawn and got some "interesting" results. At one point the wages for the production sector were -3.44. Were the people paying the government for the privilege to work? It also led to insane amounts of growth compared to the traditional economy, 239.4 percent in one case. I think this was related to the expansion into a new square; things settled down after a while but wages were negative for quite some time. Een on turn 12, wages in the production sector were 0.04 and wages in the service sector were 6.52, even though the price of production was higher than both food and resources. |
Thanks, I'll look into it. Sorry this was more frustrating than it should've been. Thanks for the info!
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Richard Bruns
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NC, USA
Nov 1999
time: 06:21
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It wasn´t frustrating at all. Already playing the Clash demos feels much more like a game than a debugging/testing exercise. I am having fun playing it, and I have seen worse flaws in finished, profesional games. I think that in a few more demos we will easily have something that is good as Civ2.
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Richard Bruns
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NC, USA
Nov 1999
time: 06:21
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I just finished playing as Romans in delenda. I had a lot of fun at first. The fight over Spain was intense, and i never knew what would happen when I pressed the end turn button. I was surprised by how quickly fights went, armies disappeared entirely in one turn. You must have tweaked the military model, because fights used to last a lot longer. I had captured Seville and built walls around it, and it spent a lot of time under siege. Marsaglia changed hands a lot. But I finally emerged victorious. And that is when things started to go wrong.
Roads are incredibly easy to build in this scenario. I built a road from Rome to Marsaglia to Sevile to help troop movements, each section taking only one turn. Then the GUI kept hounding me, saying that I had a lot of road building funds left over. So after a while, I tried an experiment and ordered a road from Seville to Carthage, but set aside no funds. It popped up in one turn, apparently from the leftover funds from earlier roads. That should IMO be counted as a bug/cheat.
I gathered up all of my troops and prepared for the final assault on Carthage. It was a massive army, several massive armies actually. I kept one on the straight of gibraltar while the other marched all over Spain taking over all the squares.
Each turn while this was going on, I would get constant messages saying "Combat in [0, 14] flat won by Romans" Apparently they were sending kamikaze units one at a time against my massive armies, accomplishing nothing.
Then I attacked Carthage on turn 80. Here is what happened:
code:
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Running Turn 80, 178AD
Outcome: winner is Rome
Outcome: winner is Rome
Outcome: winner is Rome
Outcome: winner is Rome
Outcome: winner is Rome
COMBAT Turn 80, 178AD
Combat in [5, 13] flat Carthagewon by Romans
Wall health at 57 %
Carthaginian armies
lost 40 health in long-range fights
Attack: 253586 down to 148818
Defense: 22 down to 22
Health: 3223 down to 1866
Cost: 662 down to 351
Roman armies
lost 306 health in long-range fights
Attack: 3133797 down to 2151257
Defense: 23 down to 22
Health: 50901 down to 38708
Cost: 7795 down to 5844
Turn 80, 178AD complete
-----------------------------------------
-----------------------------------------
Running Turn 81, 183AD
Outcome: winner is Rome
Outcome: winner is Rome
Outcome: winner is Rome
Outcome: winner is Rome
Outcome: winner is Rome
Outcome: winner is Rome
Outcome: winner is null
Outcome: winner is Rome
Outcome: winner is Rome
Outcome: winner is Rome
COMBAT Turn 81, 183AD
Combat in [5, 13] flat Carthagewon by Romans
Walls have been breached by besiegers.
Carthaginian armies
lost 87 health in long-range fights
Attack: 497016 down to 7579
Defense: 23 down to 22
Health: 6866 down to 92
Cost: 1362 down to 15
Roman armies
lost 666 health in long-range fights
Attack: 2170116 down to 157670
Defense: 22 down to 14
Health: 38708 down to 11291
Cost: 5844 down to 1560
Turn 81, 183AD complete
-----------------------------------------
-----------------------------------------
Running Turn 82, 188AD
Outcome: winner is Rome
Outcome: winner is Rome
Outcome: winner is Rome
Outcome: winner is Carthage
Outcome: winner is Carthage
Outcome: winner is Carthage
Outcome: winner is Rome
Outcome: winner is Rome
Outcome: winner is Rome
COMBAT Turn 82, 188AD
Combat in [5, 13] flat Carthagewon by Romans
Wall health at 0 %
Carthaginian armies
lost 1227 health in long-range fights
Attack: 233300 down to 4869
Defense: 23 down to 22
Health: 3266 down to 59
Cost: 616 down to 10
Roman armies
lost 642 health in long-range fights
Attack: 159596 down to 24888
Defense: 14 down to 14
Health: 11291 down to 1827
Cost: 1560 down to 252
Turn 82, 188AD complete
-----------------------------------------
Notice that I started with a power greater than theirs by over an order of magnitude, and I had over a dozen siege weapons. But I was utterly and completely annihlated. I quit the game then, because by this point it was taking aout half a minute to process each turn. These computers are pretty old, and apparently the game takes up a lot of overhead, which seems to increase the longer the game is played. The computer was reading off the hard disk constantly. So I gave up.
Basically, something is wrong with either the siege model or the GUI, and the game should not be run on anything more than three years old. But it was still fun.
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LDiCesare
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La Ferté sous Jouarre France
Jan 2001
time: 05:21
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Thanks for posting the log.
Several things happened here that I'll explain. I'll also make the same proposals I just did in the Siege thread:
Turn 80:
Rome attacks even though walls aren't breached. This is silly but is the current state of the code. They shouldn't but if I let them wait, there may be sieges lasting forever without any fight ever occurring. Fights should eventually occur because the defenders will make a sortie or starve. Without starving, I can't model that correctly so I wait for some code to handle food to correct that.
Turn 81:
Walls are breached. That is good. The results are quite correct in this turn, as the Carthaginians are reduced to 92 health against several thousands. They are almost wiped out. So this round is good for me. I could change it however, so that the Carthaginians should effectively be destroyed then (allow flanking around breached walls).
Turn 82:
Carthage health starts at 3000+. This means some units have been built in Carthage this turn. Note this happened on turn 81 too.
That makes a difference, but not all.
The amount of damage taken by Romans is huge, probably because some retreated. They shouldn't have retreated if they had flanked because they'd have dealt more damage and suffered less in proportion.
So I think 3 things can be done to palliate the problems:
1) Don't attack unless walls are breached. This will wait for a better food model, however.
2) Cause breached walls to be destroyed fully, and allow defenders to be flanked if the wall is breached. Should end fights faster.
3) (Need more feedback on this one): Prevent reinforcements to be raised in besieged squares. Units should be built somewhere else, and not miraculously appear behind the walls. (Note: To be really efficient, I'd have to actually know inside a square who is in and who is outside the walls, which, for squares-in-squares reasons, links with the food issue.)
Road building:
I agree with your issues. The UI about wasted econ is annoying. Probably we could make it better by
1- not displaying message if the current econ order is at 0%
2- not allowing builds outside one's territory (though I'd allow planning roads there)
3- putting a minimum time delay between order and construction of the road.
About deadly fights: Fights became deadlier when the elements were changed from an element with a fixed number of men to an element is a variable amount of men (that is very implementation dependant). Do you think it is better this way or was better before? I can tweak either the code or the defense values (or both) in order to get longer fights.
About computer speed:
The game frees little memory because it keeps lots of windows (all the event windows for instance) and logs. There is also some kind of memory leak in the econ UI panels which is particularly apparent on Mac. I'll try to meet Pierre Grignon again to see if we can make some sense out of it.
The good point is we did nothing to have good performance, so things can only get better.
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Mark_Everson
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Canton, MI
Jan 1970
time: 00:21
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quote:
Originally posted by Richard Bruns
It wasn´t frustrating at all. Already playing the Clash demos feels much more like a game than a debugging/testing exercise. I am having fun playing it, and I have seen worse flaws in finished, profesional games. I think that in a few more demos we will easily have something that is good as Civ2. |
I'm Really glad to hear that Richard!
quote:
Originally posted by LDiCesare
So I think 3 things can be done to palliate the problems:
1) Don't attack unless walls are breached. This will wait for a better food model, however.
2) Cause breached walls to be destroyed fully, and allow defenders to be flanked if the wall is breached. Should end fights faster.
3) (Need more feedback on this one): Prevent reinforcements to be raised in besieged squares. Units should be built somewhere else, and not miraculously appear behind the walls. (Note: To be really efficient, I'd have to actually know inside a square who is in and who is outside the walls, which, for squares-in-squares reasons, links with the food issue.)
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I think we need to work something out on at least most of these issues for D7.3. I think fixing 1 somehow is critical. I'd say lets discuss how to do it the right way of square-within-square for cities, and take it from there. That should also allow solution of 3 with fairly minor code changes. Lets discuss this stuff in the relevant thread(s).
quote:
Road building:
I agree with your issues. The UI about wasted econ is annoying. Probably we could make it better by
1- not displaying message if the current econ order is at 0%
2- not allowing builds outside one's territory (though I'd allow planning roads there)
3- putting a minimum time delay between order and construction of the road.
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Agree with 1, we'll just get rid of the message for now. I still disagree with #2. That would mean that even a single square of desert or other uninhabitable area cannot have roads. But I guess as a compromise we could only allow building one or two squares outside the civ. I guess we should have done 3 the last time. We decided to skip it at the last minute.
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Martin the Dane
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Aarhus, Denmark
Feb 2000
time: 06:21
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First I have a comment for the above post: I do not think it should be impossible to build roads outside one's territory, but it should not be possible to build roads on enemy teretory, unless you have an army there to protect the roadbuilders.
Now to the Dawn scenario:
I have played Dawn disregarding the advices, in order to test it, and have a few comments and suggestions. (my notes can be seen at the end of this post)
First I took my time discovering wheat, and did not follow the advice to go searching for the horses, and waited to see what happend. I was attacked by the first northern barbarians at turn 52 killing the last of that unit, after massive spendings on warriors, in turn 57.
Then nothing happend for a long time and by turn 100 I had a thriving population and economy, in my two provinces. So I sent my smallest warrior to the NE in search of the horses, sighting them but not going into the square until turn 116. By then I had a nice sized army, still waiting for those desert tribes.
Shortly after "discovering" the horses I got the first desert warning. A few turns later they kamikazied against my warriors.
I got the Second Northern and Desert warnings 1 and 2 turns after discovering Chariots respectively.
Now to my advices.
First let the player have some time after killing the wheat holding barbarian, to build up the economy, and learn a little about economy, roads, etc. Then either at a set turn or at a population size the first southern tribe is triggered, as the point of this is to learn something about defence.
After killing the first desert unit, the user should hear a rumor that som of the surrounding tribes are getting restless, so it will be a good idea to build some more wariors, after killing either the second desert unit or the first hill unit, some survivors talk about the horses.
By now the player should have explored the surrounding a bit, but not as far as the horses, and should be urged to send a unit to investigate the horse rumors. It might be an idea to have some barbarian unit gard the horses. Then after finding them, a third barbarian should strike emphasising the urgency of developing some war-use for the horses.
Finally leave the player just enough time to build up a substantial army in time to save Numantia from the invaders from the North.
I know some of this is the intention og the scenario, but as it is now is not the case. As the more masive attacks are triggered by discovering the horses, the game becomes a race to build those chariots, and not a learning experience of the game.
After looking at the scenaio .xml I see that the scenario is in fact largely as I have outlined above, but the advices are not in acordance with it.
How do I go about changing the scenario, and would this be any help. I have yet to figure out the economy system of the game, so I would not be able to do anything about that part.
| Turn 15: | Defeated the grain holding barbarians.
Did not go after the horses to se what happends. | | Turn 52: | Northern Babarian, finally killed the last by turn 57, after a massive 200% wariorbuilding. | | Turn 100: | Stil no desert tribes, so I'll move a unit NE | | Turn 116: | Went into the horse square and discovered them
Tech-level Horses 0.3 Due to research into domestication
Farming-level: well I forgot to check that | | Turn 117: | Horses Level 2.7
Farming Level 3.5
Pop 86707 | | Turn 119: | First Desert Warning | | Turn 121: | Desert tribe does not attack
Horses 2.8
Prod 0.3
Farming 3.6000001
Pop 97134 | | Turn 122: | First Desert tribe kamakazied agains my 2781 warriors killing 124 of my troopes | | Turn 123: | Alocated 60% to Domestication research keeping, 30% on Manufacturing Tech, Setting Food to 0% | | Turn 124: | Horses 2.9 | | Turn 125: | Farming 3.7
Metalurgy 0.1 |
| Turn 126: | Horses 3.0
Production 0.4
(econ view bug: no Chariots, until reopening it)
Starting to build Chariots (1/turn) | | Turn 127: | Built 1 Chariot in main Province | | Turn 128: | Built 1 Chariot in each Province That's 2! Econ says 1
Recieved 2nd Northern Warning | | Turn 129: | Built 2 Chariots in Provinc 1 and 1 in Province 2. Econ says 1.1/turn
Recieved 2nd Desert Warning | | Turn 130: | 1 Chariots built in each province.
Spotted both north an desert tribe | | Turn 131: | Northern Barbarians killed my picket and moved opposit, well they split their forces.
2 Chariots built in Province 1 Econ still says 1.0-1.1
Stopped building Chariots | | Turn 132: | Wiped out the desert tribe
Killed most of the first Northern tribe army | | Turn 133: | Killed rest of first Northern army
Killed Northern main force
one Northern Unit left, went for my northern province
(Events window says turn 134 while main window says 133 same as log) | | Turn 134: | No fighting, just getting into possition | | Turn 135: | Wiped out the last Northern barbarian. | | Turn 136: | Victory message. pop 127567 |
Edited to remove blank lines hope it works
Last edited by Martin the Dane on 27-01-2003 at 05:38
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Mark_Everson
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Canton, MI
Jan 1970
time: 00:21
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quote:
Originally posted by Martin the Dane
Now to the Dawn scenario:
I have played Dawn disregarding the advices, in order to test it, and have a few comments and suggestions. (my notes can be seen at the end of this post)
First I took my time discovering wheat, and did not follow the advice to go searching for the horses, and waited to see what happend. |
Good idea!
quote:
I know some of this is the intention og the scenario, but as it is now is not the case. As the more masive attacks are triggered by discovering the horses, the game becomes a race to build those chariots, and not a learning experience of the game.
After looking at the scenaio .xml I see that the scenario is in fact largely as I have outlined above, but the advices are not in acordance with it.
How do I go about changing the scenario, and would this be any help. |
Yes, that would be Very helpful, and I'd like to do that as soon as practical. I think its important to put out a fix for Dawn soon. However recent code updates have resulted in Dawn already having been updated for the newly revised tech system. So we need to wait until that is functional to get your changes going.
I'll ship off a version of the Testbed to you as soon as the code and scenario files are ready. The testbed is basically an unzipped version of the jar file, and will allow you to change the Dawn scenario at will for testing.
As you suggest it would be beneficial to stretch things out a bit in the beginning. We sometimes have triple bulletins when the standard should be one or at most two in a turn. I am definitely in favor of making the scenario less frantic, and more of an easy learning experience.
Thanks for doing the research, Martin, and I'm looking forward to seeing what you can do to straighten out the scenario!
BTW the reason for the large blank space in your post is that each end-of-line in your table is read as a CR in the forum softward. If you want tables to not have the leading white space you need to run all the table html together as one long line.
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Richard Bruns
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NC, USA
Nov 1999
time: 06:21
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I think I prefer the old military model, with longer fights. I noticed in this game that units seem to suffer pretty severe attrition even if they won, and that they never replaced the men that they lost. What this led to was "Expendable Unit Syndrone" where all my men are reduced to numbers and cannon fodder. Especially in antiquity, a unit that is not completely destroyed should last for a very long time. Roman legions, for example, had long distinguished histories, and until late in the Empire it was rare indeed for one to be wiped out complely. Is there even any way to heal an injured unit?
Eventually I would like to see units gain experience as they win fights. This could be as simple as a bonus to Military Tactics that only affects the power of that unit.
It should definitely be impossible to build roads in enemy territory. After all, if you have an army there to protect the builders, the game calls it your territory. I think that roads through uninhabited land should also be prohibited. A good coherent model for road builidng would be:
You use the current interface to plan a road. Funds are allocated automatically, as per military tactics. If the road is in a province you control, the money comes out of the province economy and it is automatically built. Otherwise, you need to move a unit with engineers over the road builidng spot, and the money for the roads comes out of that unit´s supplies.
Obviously we don´t have unit supplies introduced yet, so until then a road can be built from civ funds if a unit is on top of the planned site.
One problem with the game that occurs to me as I play the demos is that we have no explicit way of modeling the scale of a square. A tiny square representing a fraction of the fertile crescent is treated the same way as a square on the world map that represents a vastly larger area. This is why road building is so much easier in the Roman scenarios, because it costs the same even though the squares theoretically represent much more land. The population numbers are bigger, but the cost of a road is still the same. Things like movement time and road cost should scale up as the map scale changes.
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09-01-2003 06:06
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