A bit of an odd one here regarding the 'Railroad & river multiplier' patch. There are a few scenarios that employ the
fractional unit movement hack through MR values that exceed the 127/road multiplier limit. Examples include Imperium Romanum, El Aurens 2 (naturally), Sengoku Jidai and Herbstnebel. When the patch is enabled in the launcher and the scenario is loaded, the 'friendly warning' is produced and these units are given the maximum allowable MR based on the LCM of the movement multipliers. Now I suspect that most players are probably going to enable their favourite patches in the launcher and count on the default values taking care of business when the patches aren't in use - so they won't have to keep chopping and changing their options. When players receive the warning message (more of a debugging-type message for designers) and get huge unit MRs, they're going to wonder what's going on.
That's pretty creative, I wasn't aware of such (ab)use. How would you suggest I handle it? I can show the message but not set movement points to the max allowed? I agree the message might not make too much sense for players, but for designers it's pretty easy to exceed the limit with the new multipliers.
BTW, the patch changes all signed operations related to movement to unsigned ones, so the limit is now 255/multiplier.
Save file extensions: Extends the saved game format allowing patches to store arbitrary data. This should open up a lot of possibilities for future modifications.
Would you mind explaining how this works (as if you were talking to a child
).
Sure. Up to this point, most patches only read new settings from places (rules.txt mostly); they didn't need to keep track of in-game changes. Some patches/requests do need this, and that requires writing data to the saved game. For example, the attacks-per-turn patch needs to store how many attacks have been used by a unit, otherwise you could load a game and suddenly have all attacks available again.
Now, to just have patches store their data in the saved game by themselves is not a very good idea, since every modification would basically create a new version of the saved game format. Since patches can be enabled/disabled individually in the launcher, multiple patches changing the format would create an exponential number of incompatible formats.
Much better is to create one patch to handle the process of reading/writing data, and have other patches depend on it. Now we just have one new version of the format, patches don't have to reinvent the wheel when reading/writing data, and the game can report which patches need to be enabled when loading a game with extension data.
The feature I most desperately need is a reversed version of CivStack so that I can remove airbases from nearly all land squares in all of my scenarios. That would save me many hours of tedious work!
It would be pretty simple to do in TOTPP. I'll see if I can put it in there somewhere.
I have just been testing out all of the TOTPP features and they all work perfectly.
They don't, actually
. I just found out that ProductionCarryOver is on by default when the patch is enabled. For now, you'd have to set it to 0 explicitly in @COSMIC2, or just leave the patch disabled.
I've added the new features to my work in progress for the Burma Campaign, and it works just as requested, which is really quite brilliant. I realize however, that I was not thinking clearly enough when I asked for independently set movement rates for rail, road and river. What would be even more useful would be to have a setting with no particular movement rate for rivers, ie. you just pay the movement cost of the other terrain in the square. Is it possible? I'm terribly sorry for not thinking this through in the first place.
Best you can do for now is set it to 1.
