17-02-2003 18:00									#31
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Thanks for the comments Mark, I have a few ideas as how to thinn and spread out the messages, but befor I start doing a lot more, I have a few questions.

First:
What's the difference between the old and new scenario model? And what would the impact on on the scenarioes be?

Second:
ROI? As far as I can see ROI is not available in Dawn. How is ROI enabled/disabled?

Third:
Do I understand you correctly in that replacing the new (Testbed 7.6) .xml-files with the old ones (Testbed 7.5) will give me the new scenario model? My version of Dawn is a heavely modified version of the one in Testbed 7.5

	17-02-2003 19:45									#32
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I have produced Clash Testbed 7.6.1 and uploaded it to:

http://paws.wcu.edu/rb22393/clash/Clash_7-6-1.asp

This version includes both Martin´s new Dawn scenario and the modifications made by Richard to all of the other scenarios. Since Dawn includes all data as part of the xml file, these do not conflict in any way. Nothing has been changed, except that the unit pictures in Dawn now work with the new images.xml file.

	17-02-2003 23:00									#33
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Thanks Richard, I hadn't been sure if you had unified tech for Dawn or not. Good that no work has been lost. I'll check out the new version as soon as I've got time.

quote: Originally posted by Martin the Dane What's the difference between the old and new scenario model? And what would the impact on on the scenarioes be?

Hi Martin. I expect the info is in the readme for Richard's Testbed 7.6.1. If not, he says in the Testbed 7.5.1 thread what the differences are. Please ask again if those don't answer your questions

quote: ROI? As far as I can see ROI is not available in Dawn. How is ROI enabled/disabled?

There is a switch in the buidlingorders tag called "minimal/" that makes it happen. It can easily be disabled during a game, we just need to have an event type that does it.

quote: Do I understand you correctly in that replacing the new (Testbed 7.6) .xml-files with the old ones (Testbed 7.5) will give me the new scenario model? My version of Dawn is a heavely modified version of the one in Testbed 7.5

Probably simpler now just to take Testbed 7.6.1 that Richard put out.

	18-02-2003 01:44									#34
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One thing that is in the new package, and that you can see in the Carthado delenda scenario I put in is the ability to change an ai (in fact, you can also change the player's) build orders. So Carthage can switch production to elephants or siege engines based on some event. I don't remember who asked for that, but someone did.

	18-02-2003 01:50									#35
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I just (re) read Rodrigo's paper on military history on the web page, and here are a few thoughts about military units that could become available with the corresponding techs, some techs coresponding to culture things:
Warrior (club/spearmen) no prereq
Archer (small prereq)
Chariot - horses, bronze working (metallurgy) - horses knowledge should come from contact with nomadic civs, or a civ should be nomadic in order to learn horses tech in the first place. There could be a simple duality between agriculture and horses as a starting tech. Nomad units can move population around anyway.
Phalanx - bronze working (metallurgy), mortal combat - mortal combat would be active only for certain civs, and spread as fights against these are fought. For instance, aztecs wouldn't know that tech (they just make prisoners, which they later sacrifice)
Mounted archer - horses
Legion - metallurgy, military tactics, mortal combat
Heavy cavalry - horses, metallurgy, mortal combat
Catapults/siege engines - masonry, enables siege tactics
Cannons - gunpowder, siege tactics - siege tactics is a big helper of early gunpowder, enables cannon making
Muskets - gunpowder, cannon making - you can't make muskets if you can't make cannons?
(Modern units)

Our scenarios don't go that far, but I thought it worth to pop that up as scenarios rely on the tech tree and units.
In particular, we could maybe see by events (like losing one city to an adversary who has one tech enabling that tech) we can simulate some of these unit progressions? Ultimately enabling a tech by contact with another civ should be coded, not scripted, but I am not there yet.

I'd also like to point out that in the original military.xml file, there are skirmisher elements in almost all units, which have the skirmish order available. They do make a difference in fights, as they allow better manoeuvering. The units shouldn't be rid of them simply because they have less punch than other elements.

	18-02-2003 05:31									#36
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quote: There is a switch in the buidlingorders tag called "minimal/" that makes it happen. It can easily be disabled during a game, we just need to have an event type that does it.

Can I write an event to remove it, or is it the event code that needs to be added?

I'm curently looking into the possibility of making the Dawn scenario use the standard files. What might make this possible is that there now are units with 500 men.

The only problem I se right away is that I'll have to create a Barbarian version of both Mob and Warriors, and I'm not sure if I'll have to redeclare the elements to make sure there are no problems:

quote: from dataformat.html Note that you should be careful not to define military elements in a scenario file which default to elements defined in another file

	18-02-2003 06:15									#37
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quote: Originally posted by Martin the Dane Can I write an event to remove it, or is it the event code that needs to be added?

Event code needs to be added to do this during the game. To see what ROI looks like in Dawn though, you could change "minimal/" to "standard/" (The standard one is what is used in all the other scenarios) and then you will get all the orders and ROI also. That is too complex for Dawn when we release it officially , but for testing and figuring out what to say about ROI it should be fine.

quote: I'm curently looking into the possibility of making the Dawn scenario use the standard files. What might make this possible is that there now are units with 500 men.

If you think you can do it, that would be good. But if things start to break down I would put it off for now.

quote: The only problem I se right away is that I'll have to create a Barbarian version of both Mob and Warriors, and I'm not sure if I'll have to redeclare the elements to make sure there are no problems:

You could use the same units as the player and just have lots of them organized into task forces. That seems easiest.

	18-02-2003 16:19									#38
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I will certainly try to take advantage of the ability to change build orders. Mostly these will be techevents, so the AI builds new units if it gets them.

My tech tree is quite close to that list of prerequisites and helper techs.

The only reason skirmishers are left out is that I don't have any pictures for them. I had already coded tham and added them to the xml before I realized the lack of pictures, and I had to take them out again. I'll hunt for pictures and add them back in if I find anything I can use.

Martin, Clash 7.5.1 had a version of Dawn that used the standard units, and was balanced properly with those units. Do you want me to send that file to you? By the way, it is not necessary to have barbarian versions of the units, as that file shows. The barbarians can simply have the standard units.

	18-02-2003 20:33									#39
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quote: Originally posted by Richard Bruns Martin, Clash 7.5.1 had a version of Dawn that used the standard units, and was balanced properly with those units. Do you want me to send that file to you? By the way, it is not necessary to have barbarian versions of the units, as that file shows. The barbarians can simply have the standard units.

Yes please mail it to me, I have looked for it among the files I have, but have not been able to find it. All the verions I have, use their own version of elements and units.

	19-02-2003 02:21									#40
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quote: The only reason skirmishers are left out is that I don't have any pictures for them. I had already coded tham and added them to the xml before I realized the lack of pictures, and I had to take them out again. I'll hunt for pictures and add them back in if I find anything I can use.

You can put skirmisher elements in a unit. A unit doesn't have to be made of a single type of elements. There should be some scouts in almost all armies. That way, you don't need an image.

	19-02-2003 12:21									#41
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I wanted combined arms decisions to be the player´s choice, not the scenario designer´s. Eventually we should have something like a unit building workshop, where the player builds up army units from elements. That way there wouldn´t need to be any units defined in the files, except a few defaults.

	19-02-2003 17:28									#42
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quote: Originally posted by Richard Bruns I wanted combined arms decisions to be the player´s choice, not the scenario designer´s.

Hi Richard. I think Laurent's approach is better. First it makes individual units not be hamstrung by being too one-dimensional, and thus losing combat effectiveness. Second its the way brigades and such work in the real world. To finetune overall number of skirmishers or scouts in an army you certainly could have dedicated skirmishing/scouting units that could be added in addition to the normal scouting strength of a unit.

quote: Eventually we should have something like a unit building workshop, where the player builds up army units from elements. That way there wouldn´t need to be any units defined in the files, except a few defaults.

The workshop is definitely the way to go, but I think that doesn't reduce the need for a full complement of detailed units. Having just a few defaults would be completely inadequate in my mind. Then the player would be Forced to use the workshop rather than using it just when they wanted to do something different and creative. I'd call that MM to be avoided.

What do others think? Anyway, further discussion should migrate to the military thread IMO.

	19-02-2003 19:25									#43
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Do we have any world maps for Clash? I tried to make one of my own, but it was absolutely horrible.

	20-02-2003 05:37									#44
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quote: Originally posted by Richard Bruns Do we have any world maps for Clash? I tried to make one of my own, but it was absolutely horrible.

We have none so far. But I think any world map worth calling such will have too many squares to work well with the current code. Until we figure out why Attila runs so slowly and fix it, this seems premature to me. . .

	21-02-2003 00:25									#45
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I tried to make a map of (just) Europe, and it really has to be very big in order to show details like the English Channel... The file might even clutter one zip or another (Europe.xml). We'd better see how the game scales AND make a map editor before tackling real world map. I love vi, but drawing the map by hand and populating it by hand is really not user-friendly.

	21-02-2003 04:52									#46
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l'm now about half way through getting the economic model hooked to to use xml for initialization. Its very straightforward the way Gary set up the xml parser, but of course in changing it I'm sure to run into bugs due to previous econ startup assumptions being violated.

When I'm done there will be a lot more freedom in things like econ/tech hookups, adding special commodities to scenarios at will, and other toys for the scenario designers! I hope to be done tomorrow, but no guarantees. . .

	21-02-2003 16:39									#47
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I have never seen any europe map in any testbeds I have. I´d like to use it, if you could upload it somewhere or e-mail it to me.

That sounds great, Mark. I´ll experiment with it, if it is well documented. But I´m not sure how much I want to mess with it; the economics.xml file is complicated and scary and I don´t know much about the model. Before I dig into it, could you point me to a good, concise summary and explanation of the current economics model?

	21-02-2003 18:13									#48
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quote: Originally posted by Richard Bruns I have never seen any europe map in any testbeds I have. I´d like to use it, if you could upload it somewhere or e-mail it to me.

If you get to the stage where you want to do something, demo 4 had a vaguely decent Europe map that might be of some help. But you would need to transcribe it by hand since it was originally done in a different coordinate system, and I transformed it on the fly in the demo code. To see the map zoomed out just set the square size to 20.

quote: That sounds great, Mark. I´ll experiment with it, if it is well documented. But I´m not sure how much I want to mess with it; the economics.xml file is complicated and scary and I don´t know much about the model. Before I dig into it, could you point me to a good, concise summary and explanation of the current economics model?

I'll give you info on what docs I've got when I release it. That will be a combination of existing econ documentation and the javadoc code documentation. After that I'd just have to answer questions as they come up, and then add those discussions to the documentation.

	23-02-2003 00:39									#49
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I'm having some trouble with adding population to a square via the <square> tag in the scenario files. The code i'm using is the following:

code:

<square>
  <location>Ebla</location>
  <province>Ebla</province>
  <people>
    <ethnicity>Arab Tribesmen</ethnicity>
    <population>500</population>
  </people>
</square>

	23-02-2003 03:04									#50
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I see where this population bug comes from and will fix it.

	23-02-2003 04:18									#51
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Thank's Laurent

I jus noticed another pequliar thing, when population is added in the scenario-file the number of farms changes to a number relative to the population added.
At the first glance this seems logical. But as the number of farms does not increase when the population grow, even when investing heavely in building farms, it is not such a good an idea. In fact it efectively limits the population a square can support.

IMO each square should have a fixed number of potential farm-sites depending on the type of terrain and the number of farms should be relative to the number of farmers.

The farm output should be relative to the number of farmers, but the efectiveness of the farmers should fall as the number of farmers/farm increased while the efectiveness of the farmes increased so at some point adding more farmers would not contribute to the food-output. Naturally the farming-tech-level should influence it all.

	23-02-2003 04:33									#52
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quote: Originally posted by Martin the Dane I jus noticed another pequliar thing, when population is added in the scenario-file the number of farms changes to a number relative to the population added.

Hi Martin, yes you have found a kludge I put in to get the delenda scenario to work. Otherwise the standard numbers of farm sites, combined with the population levels Gary put in the scenario, would result in calamatous population decline. It will work mostly as you say it should in the future.

One thing I should make clear. Farm sites = Land. Whereas building farms with the economy is investing in Improving the farms on that land. Improving means everything from making/buying tools, to ensuring proper field care and drainage, etc. At a given tech level there is only so much improvement you can make before diminishing returns sets in. Farm productivity is a function of all of: arable land (farm sites); investment (Build farm); and Labor. Look at "production function" on the econ page on the web site if you want more details.

Unfortunately setting it as it should be right now will ruin the Delenda and Attila scenarios. One thing I could do is put in a special tag that says to cheat on the farm sites, and use that for only those scenarios where the effect is necessary.

How does that sound?

	23-02-2003 04:50									#53
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Hmm. sure better than the way it is now, but wouldn't it be just as easy to add a terrain section to the scenario-file, where it's possible to specify alterations to terrains?

Ex.:

code:

 <terrain>
   <name>plain</name>
   <farmes>80</farms>
   <resources>6</resources>
 </terrain>

	23-02-2003 05:19									#54
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quote: Originally posted by Martin the Dane Hmm. sure better than the way it is now, but wouldn't it be just as easy to add a terrain section to the scenario-file, where it's possible to specify alterations to terrains? Ex.: code: <terrain> <name>plain</name> <farmes>80</farms> <resources>6</resources> </terrain> This would result in all plains in the scenario having 80 farm-sites and 6 resource sites.

But all plains are not equally populated in the scenario now, so this solution wouldn't work. The low-population squares would start to shoot up rapidly in population. Maybe we should just revisit delenda, but I don't want to take that on right now.

Frankly I had been hoping that we could wait for a map editor before doing things like farm site changes. But if its determined to be really important, we could do it now using a grid approach like for population. It'd take maybe an hour for everything but the detailed data entry.

	23-02-2003 06:08									#55
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Hmm. Well then I guess I'd go for the cheat-tag. It's not that important.
What I was trying to do was scatter a few minor tribes around the map in Dawn, to add some pop to make a higher pop-goal possible. But I guess I'll just give the player a little extra pop to start with for now.

Btw. Is there a target-date for the next release?

	23-02-2003 07:11									#56
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quote: Originally posted by Martin the Dane Hmm. Well then I guess I'd go for the cheat-tag. It's not that important. What I was trying to do was scatter a few minor tribes around the map in Dawn, to add some pop to make a higher pop-goal possible. But I guess I'll just give the player a little extra pop to start with for now.

That sounds better to me anyway. Don't want to make Dawn too complicated.

quote: Btw. Is there a target-date for the next release?

Not really. I'd like to have had something out already. But improvements are coming from so many directions its hard to know what critical number of features will come together in which area and when! Areas where significant accomplishments may (or may not) come soon are: Scenarios (especially one that has lots of tech per the D7.3 plan); AI improvements; Diplomacy; and the new econ gui, among others. But because RL can sideline anyone at any time its hard to make a firm plan.

As soon as we have significant new stuff for a demo, I'll set a date. However with all the changes we will need a testing period of a week or so between that time and the release so that there's enough time to ensure any big bugs are handled. It could be 7.3 or we could skip right to 8 depending on what we get. My current guess is it will be at least 2-3 weeks before the demo is out. Hope that helps. . .

	23-02-2003 13:51									#57
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quote: That sounds better to me anyway. Don't want to make Dawn too complicated.

I had more plans for those minor tribes. Originally I wanted them to be nomadic tribes that showed up at some point during the game, and were "persuaded" to settle and become part of the players civ. But as that's not really part of the game I soon dismissed the idea and started to think of them as possible minor settlements, that could be used to demontrate conquest, first of unguarded land then of guarded land. (What better way to learn the importance of defence than to accidentally take over an unprotected square )

But I'll leave that to a later date, and concentrate on making my version of Dawn use the standard units etc.

	23-02-2003 18:02									#58
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quote: Originally posted by Martin the Dane I had more plans for those minor tribes. Originally I wanted them to be nomadic tribes that showed up at some point during the game, and were "persuaded" to settle and become part of the players civ. But as that's not really part of the game I soon dismissed the idea and started to think of them as possible minor settlements, that could be used to demontrate conquest, first of unguarded land then of guarded land. (What better way to learn the importance of defence than to accidentally take over an unprotected square ) But I'll leave that to a later date, and concentrate on making my version of Dawn use the standard units etc.

Hi Martin: Your plan sounds decent to me. There is really no reason why you can't put in such tribes. At least the farm sites issue shouldn't be an obstacle. Just put in people in the square roughly equal to ~700x the number of farm sites in the square, and the farm site issue won't come up! (of course this may have to wait for that xml fix, but we may have that in today's new release).

	23-02-2003 18:25									#59
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I want the tribes to be less than 5000 at the time they are discovered by the player, so they take up only one square. My plan was to put 5-800 people in each of these small settlements. I made a tent icon for them, to denote their semi-nomadic state. (I'm not much of an artist so it's preaty ugly)

Btw. is it possible to add population to a square in an event?

quote: (of course this may have to wait for that xml fix, but we may have that in today's new release).

While we are at it, I have noticed quite a few discrepancies between the .xml and the description in "dataformat.html"

I'll write them down as I find them. The only ones I can remember right now is in that it's not possible to have a civilization sub-tag in <unit>, and several events can't be contained within <eventjoin>, <eventunion>, etc.

	23-02-2003 19:20									#60
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quote: Originally posted by Martin the Dane I want the tribes to be less than 5000 at the time they are discovered by the player, so they take up only one square. My plan was to put 5-800 people in each of these small settlements. I made a tent icon for them, to denote their semi-nomadic state. (I'm not much of an artist so it's preaty ugly)

A few quick ideas: Start them with like 100 population. It will take a loooong time to grow large since the max growth rate per turn is 4%. Just figure when you want the player to find them, and what size they should be at that point. Then you can check it. If they have an army, make sure to give the civ bonus army supplies so that the troops don't eat the people out of all their food.

quote: Btw. is it possible to add population to a square in an event?

I really know embarassingly little about events. Hopefully Laurent can answer this quickly.

quote: While we are at it, I have noticed quite a few discrepancies between the .xml and the description in "dataformat.html" I'll write them down as I find them.

Then we'll have to figure out which are bugs and which are features and either fix or update the manual as appropriate.