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ssfsx17
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The road interface is kinda clumsy. I found that creating road routes was a )(*#$*&) pain in the butt. I liked the original Civ style of simply either having roads in a tile or not, and the road graphics automatically show connectedness. I mean, if you want to reduce micromangement, the current road interface is a bit of a failure.
I discovered that, as long as you make sure that you have about 7 warriors or so by turn 50, you can basically avoid getting the horses and build up your civilization into a really humongous powerhouse. Then, by, say, turn 175 when you finally decide to get the horses, you can actually finish off the invaders with floods of warriors.
I think a good idea for the next Demo is to include a "sandbox" scenario where there are no invading threats. Instead, the player simply develops his/her nation up and can explore the map for various special resources all around the world.
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Martin the Dane
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Aarhus, Denmark
Feb 2000
time: 06:21
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ssfsx17 the sandbox sounds like a good idea, Mark, what about using that idea, coupled with an intro to economy and population migration?
And btw, ssfsx17, don't count on the dawn scenario staying as cooperative as it is now  the idea for that scenario is/will be defence, so ...... 
I'd like to get back into the scenarioes soon, as I don't speak java, and don't have a current testbed version, I feel kindoff ... outside the loop. 
Martin the Dane.
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Stormbeard
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Since I have been instructed to post my issues about getting the demo (or as I would prefer to call it, Version 0.7.2) to work, I will post them here
Well, I have tried to do it long before, and failed. Now, I have tried more recently and met with more success. However, I now have a dilemma.
Section 1; Windows is EVIL:
Because I had gotten the impression that this game was oriented at  Windows, I had attempted to follow the instructions on the Download page on the site. Then, I had issues with unzipping (don't ask) which were solved by using my GNU-Linux Fedora Core computer. Then I looked at the 2 emerging files and did not know what to do with them- running the BAT file did nothing, because my #(@&%^Windows failed to get that .jar file open. I had downloaded the JRE package as instructed. Installed it as it wanted. 
Section 2; The dangers of Sun Microsystems.
I then tried attacking it in my Linux mode. I managed to manually open the .jar file, but now I am faced with another dilemma. I know not what to do next. The jar has extracted into a folder tree that apparently contains all needed to run clash (from images to scenarios). However, it lacks something to run.
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Stormbeard
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I had Windows 2000. I had in fact installed JRE, I decided to blame it on Windows (my windows doesn't have WinZip, so it's really skeletal) and move on. Now I'm trying to get it to work on Linux.
As I said, I extracted the ".jar" file, and then looked inside and found no central executable file. What do you do to run clash in a testbed?
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LDiCesare
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La Ferté sous Jouarre France
Jan 2001
time: 05:21
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If you can't run the jar by double clicking it, inside the zip there's a class called game.manager.GameMain (it must be written in a file called manifesto or something like this). You can run 'java game.manager.GameMain' if you set the classpath variable correctly (depending on java version, under unix, it can be export CLASSPATH=whatver:thejar.jar, or java -classpath blah.jar).
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Reynard
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I just started playing CoC a little before midnight...it's 4 am now hehe. I finished the tutorial scenario(after finding out that you don't follow it) and then tackled the fertile crescent, first with one of the easy ones and then Jericho. It was a bit tricky playing as Jericho but I found it much more interesting than Civ-style strategy...it was exactly what I was looking for.
But I noticed what seems like a huge flaw in the current tech design doing the fertile crescent scenario....(dunno if anyone has mentioned it yet, there are so many replies in this thread)
Basically, if you get enough food tech, it'll snowball and you'll start gaining population absurdly quickly, which means more tech, etc.. By turn 200 or so I was able to set my warrior production to 1 percent and pump out 20 or 30 of them. Similarly, your provinces soon crawl out to cover the map at a rate of one or more every turn. My population, when I finally decided to call it quits, went into the hundreds of millions, maybe the billions. Obviously not a very realistic result, considering that it was still ~4000 BC 
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LDiCesare
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La Ferté sous Jouarre France
Jan 2001
time: 05:21
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Althoug Reynard's point is relevant, I think the flaw is not so much in the tech system as in the pop growth model. The current pop growth is dependant on food only and should be kept in check by plague when overpopulation occurs. Even simple limits on growth a la CtP2 could work here: You'd have a max population in a square based on some sanitation tech level, and growth would be stunted progressively as you come near the max population.
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Reynard
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Actually, I plan on being a game designer myself, so I'd love to try contributing on this.
The first thing is that as of right now there is no real distinction between a "city" and "farmlands." Every square gets equal treatment as far as gameplay is concerned. This is very much like how things were prior to industrialization, when the majority of people were subsistence farmers. A more realistic model, though, would somehow designate some squares to become urban areas and grow their pop based on the surplus of the surrounding farms and the transportation technology available. The population of the farmland would correspondingly grow or dimish depending on whether technology/economics made it more profitable to stay in one place or the other. In modern industrial countries only a relatively small number of people now have to work in the countryside - it's going to be a tough transition to model properly.
The second thing is that there isn't any modelling of technological interdependence and inventions based on economic/social conditions. Farming techniques like crop rotation resulted from the consolidation of land ownership to a small nobility that could afford to experiment, and many modern tools also require modern manufacture(tractors need factories and steel, and those things needed precision machining and study of chemical properties, which needed clocks and education, etc...). I think the "tech tree" Civ model is also inappropriate, though.
Ideally, I think the advancement rate should mostly be determined by things like environment, population, and most of all economic factors such as goods produced and traded, and communication abilities. For example, it could be done so that the player gets economic choices like "beer," "wheat," "weapons," etc. and choosing different items to be produced results in a new economic "mix" in subsequent turns. If the player wants his civ to learn more about biological processes, he might up the production of beer, livestock, and education, wheras if he wanted improved engineering abilities, he might focus efforts towards mining, bridge and road-building, and monuments.
The beauty of this system is that it doesn't force the player into the either/or "science vs. production" and "warrior code vs. writing" balance of Civ, which was always kind of lame; scientific research even today can still be roughly split into research based on education and educational systems, and research from industry(and if you consider the military an industry you're pretty much covered), and there's never been a "magic box" - it's all about having the right conditions, and maybe a little luck. The management is also much more clear - either you try to build the economy up into a state where it'll advance, or you focus on more pressing needs like pleasing the population or saving the environment or defeating invasions. It's also going to take a lot more under-the-hood work to build this model than to continue along the lines of the existing system, but as an idea, I like it 
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LDiCesare
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La Ferté sous Jouarre France
Jan 2001
time: 05:21
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Reynard, you should really check the tech model and threads (though these must be old).
The points you state are not really correct from my point of view. There aren't buffers against infinite growth in the demo but that doesn't mean the tech model is flawed. There may be some factor missing to stunt growth, but tech grows based on what money you put in it AND other factors. For instance, fighting battles automatically improves your military tactics tech. Increasing in farm tech will currently increase the underlying biology tech, and this may let you discover other biology-related techs simply because you researched farming.
So the current tech model is, imo, very good. The point is it's not used as much as it could be in any of the scenarios because we lack a proper tech 'tree', with techs of all tiers and various applications. To sum it up quickly, anything can be an 'activity' that produces research points, including having neighbours, farming, fighting, or spending money explicitly.
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Reynard
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That's fine, then. I might try making a Civ-style game myself someday.
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manurein
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Paris, France
May 1999
time: 05:21
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Hi all
For those who dont know, i've been working on the first (or maybe second ...) social model of Clash some years ago.
I just would like to put my point about population growth, becuse this is something I've been thinking about along the social model.
I think population growth (or decrease...) should not be based only on food availability.
IMHO it is dependant on many factors :
- general life duration : before the industrial era, the average death age in Europe was somewhere around 30; this obviously limited the population growth;
- death at birth or before maturity : during the middle ages, very few children (maybe 1 over 3 or 4) reached maturity and were able to have children;
- mother death during birth : because of lack of sanitation, many mothers died during the birth of their children, thus limiting the number of children they could have;
- plagues : historically, some grand-scale plagues had a very deep impact on population; for example, the vagues of Black Death plague in Europe during the 13th and 14th century reduced the european population by about 1/3; this is huge and very significant in terms of population growth modeling;
- lastely, food should have an impact on population growth, but quite limited : the un-availability of food limits the population growth through famine; however, food availabability should not allow unlimited growth if other factors (like good sanitation) are not present.
- in modern eras other factors count, like "social" factors (in western countries parents have around 2 children, although it is possible for them to have much more in terms of food availability, sanitation etc) or "political" factors (like population growth policies in China).
Cheers
Manu
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Martin the Dane
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Aarhus, Denmark
Feb 2000
time: 06:21
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I mostly agree with Manu. Principally I agree that all these factors should be incorporated in the population growth equations, but we must make sure the player (ourselves included) can comprehend the factors and how to manipulate them.
In some games I have played, population growth is a “technology”, and in others (Civ and CtP etc.) it is solely based on food, both of those systems are too simple. IMO the factors affecting population growth should be both more realistic and more complex, but presented to the player in a way that makes it intuitive witch of the factors are the limiting factors, so the player can take appropriate action.
The lower the infrastructure level in a given area, the more dependent the area is on local food and sanitation. But if there is a valuable commodity, like gold or gems, the population level is mostly dictated by the economical possibilities (or rather the perceived economical possibilities) for the people moving there. The same is the case for cities.
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