The Rood and the Dragon - the Anglo-Saxon scenario

[The Last Conformist]

Grrr ... computer crash ... almost finnished with long reply ...

Aeler told me that his thegns had "sexed up" intelligence on my forces, and that he, therefore, would after-all not attack me. Rather stunned me ...

I'm playing as Mercia, on Monarch level. I find it very hard to keep up in tech for some reason, even with the other Anglo-Saxon factions. I suppose one of them buys something from the Welsh and the rest buys it at a discount ...

I've had some success bullying Hwicce and East Anglia for techs, but Raedwald just developed a spine, which precipitated my first major war. I've taken an East Anglian city west of the ruins at (78,108), and while an attack at a second one at the Wash failed, I'm reasonably confident I can take out the East Anglians as long as no-one intervenes on their side.

A small previous war netted me a city Lindsey had built at the mountains SE of Caerlegion.

I've caved in to some demands from Gwynedd and Powys - they grew very powerful very quickly. Rather counterintuitively, Powys also managed to plop down at least one city in eastern England during the initial landgrabbing phase.

Needless to say, all the civs of England and Wales are crazy about sending settlers to Scotland. I dread to think what it looks like up there ...

Snatching workers with Wanderers is great fun. However, my Wanderers do seem to suffer from a curse that makes them invariably lose when attacking Athelings and Beorns.

 

[Plotinus]

Diplomatic loss? crikey. I didn't know that was possible!

And seeing the whole map? Nah, that's cheating. Rest assured it's Britain-shaped.

[R8XFT] Thank you for the comments. I must say that the intricacies of the victory/defeat screen had me rather defeated: I did try hard to ensure that everything was as it should be but eventually concluded that Wyrd had decreed otherwise in this case (my instructions in the text file looked flawless to me however long I stared at them, gently weeping, in a sort of George Harrison-style melancholy). The same was true of those inexplicably disfunctional Civilopedia links (it's only a few - the ones that lead from the entries on Anglo-Saxons/Romano-Britons to the individual civs). As I say, with the diplomacy screen, not all the leaderheads have the appropriate pictures, so my proof-reader's brain kicked in and decided it would be better to be consistent and have none of them rather than use a few and the others blank. That would look messy, I felt. In theory, of course, I could create those files myself by using some of the other stills that are provided, and that was my original plan, but I'm afraid that by this stage I never wanted to see the damn thing again! Perhaps at some point I will try and sort this out properly, especially if it turns out there are lots of other things that need changing as well so it might be worthwhile doing them all at once. In the meantime, I'm glad you like it otherwise, and I must thank you for your splendid leaderheads, without which such scenarios wouldn't be possible in the first place!

 

[Dease]

great scenario
However, I'm having a hard time playing it since Civ causes an illegal error after I've played ~5 turns and civ just dies. I've done the normal things to try and fix it, reinstall, reinstall scenario, etc... I'm pretty sure the fault is not on your end since my copy of C3C has never been very stable (it IS fully patched). Looking at the "details" when the error occurs, it seems it is causing a page fault in mp3(forget the rest).exe this makes me think it has something to do with the music being from the RoR conquest...possibly. I went to edit the music text file but there isn't one there, so, my question is, how can I have the normal civ music playing instead of the RoR music (though I will miss the atmosphere it creates )

 

[Birdjaguar]

Diplomatic loss? How does that happen? Anyway, in game two I'm playing wessex and playing a more traditional (for me) game. I expanded via settlers until had filled all the near by space. I even settled a victory point location to the SE. Then I switched to battle mode. I negotiated MPP with neighbors and took down Kent and Essex to a city each (and picked up another victory location). Sussex is probably going to be next. In victory points, Ireland is first, I am second. The tech pace has been very fast and I am behind. IIRC its about 650 AD. I am a christian monarchy. I'm still figuring out the unitls an buildings as i go. I didn't know there was a diplomatic win. No sign of the vikings yet, so I've sent a boat to seek them out. It's great fun and very rich in detail. Similar to TAM, but faster.

 

[Plotinus]

I didn't know there was a diplomatic loss either!

I've made a patch to address the issues noted by Fëanor and The Last Conformist (and a couple of others I noticed on the way). This is attached to the post with the original download in it. I'm fairly sure that you can download and install this even if you are in the middle of a game, although I'm not 100% on that; if you'd rather not risk it, don't build either the Seafarer or the Great Synod until you've installed the patch! Apologies for that... Please let me know of any other hiccups and I'll try to address them.

 

[Plotinus]

Dease - I'm pretty sure that your crashing problem has nothing to do with this scenario, or at least it may be a combination of your system with this scenario. I didn't touch any kind of music files, as you can see. I'm not sure it's actually possible to make the game play the standard music. This is because scenario folders that contain the music.txt file will make the game play the tunes specified in those folders. But the Epic game does not have a music.txt file - it simply plays all the tunes. This means that you can't simply copy the Epic music.txt file into the Rood folder, thereby overriding the ROR music, because there isn't one. I'd say there are two things you could do: first, you could delete the music.txt file from each of the Conquest folders that Rood looks in (you can see which those are by looking in Edit) - or (which would be far preferable) you can create a new music.txt file specifying all the tunes you want and put that in the Rood folder. Colonel Kraken's thread at http://forums.civfanatics.com/showthread.php?t=87181 would help here. Alternatively, it might be best simply to turn the music off and put something funky on the stereo. Sorry not to have any better ideas!

BJ - sounds like you're getting the hang of it. Although I should warn you - you cannot sail to the Viking homeland. You must wait for them to come to you! Which they will, at some point. They *should* appear at approximately the period that they did in reality. They won't necessarily attack at first sight but they should be pretty belligerent and want land. I might add that the areas they target are likely (though by no means certain) to correspond to those that they attacked in real life, so being Wessex can be a smart move in this regard.

The AI *will* send settlers all over the place. Of course that's simply a feature of Civ - the AI is programmed to make settling a priority, even if it means sending a settler to the side of the world to some godforsaken Arctic rock. Hence the weird, useless little colonies you always get. I did my best to keep this within reason in this scenario (hence the unsettlable plains on the fringes of Ireland and Scotland) but there's only so much one can do...

 

[hIdDeN_eViL]

have the bugs in the first few posts been fixed
i prefer to download somthing just the once especially something this big,
although from the good comments, i think it will be worth it
and the screenies give me a good impression

 

[Plotinus]

Yes, fixed now. You'll have to download the patch as well, from the same post, but it's very small. I *hope* there shouldn't be any more such faults with it.

 

[The Last Conformist]

Annoying as South Saxon cities in Scotland are, they're still a far cry from Assyrian colonies on the Syr-Darya, to mention something I saw in TAM.

 

[utahjazz7]

I really enjoy playing the scenerio. The only thing that I don't like is that military alliances, MPP, and ROP come so soon. In my first two games, I was simply overwhelmed, as I was being attacked by five or six other tribes at the same time. In my third go, I am the Northumbrians and was able to secure a large land area. Along with another tribe--the Dairians or something--I'm now out to a tech lead, and that makes things more fun. The only other problem I'm having is remembering who is who because I'm totally unfamiliar with the names of the tribes and leaders!

Anyway, I'm really liking this scenerio--good job!

 

[Asclepius]

Diplomatic loss? How does that happen?

I suffered a humiliating culture loss to the Celts in Ireland in just over two hours but I thought a diplomatic loss was only possible if the UN had been built and your civ gets out-voted. Surely the Celts didn't invent the UN as well?

 

[The Last Conformist]

Isn't it, BTW, a bit odd to have the Northumbrians and the Deirans? Wouldn't Bernicians and Deirans make more sense?

 

[Plotinus]

[utahjazz] Aha, that's the main reason I decided to make the diplomatic options appear relatively early. I've noticed that in the Epic game they tend to encourage wars rather than prevent them, because as far as I can tell the AI is not programmed to be wary of going to war with someone who is allied to everyone else, and so a small skirmish can escalate into complete world war within a couple of turns. And I did want to encourage as much war as possible in this scenario. Come now, I know you're equal to the challenge!

[TLC] I wondered if someone would mention that. Yes, Northumbria actually came into being through a union of Bernicia and Deira, so the faction named "Northumbria" in this scenario should really be "Bernicia". But they united pretty early on, and were known as Northumbria ever after, which became one of the most powerful and important Anglo-Saxon kingdoms. I felt it would be odd to have a scenario about Anglo-Saxons which didn't have Northumbria in it, so I decided to be a bit anachronistic and name Bernicia "Northumbria" (since it was always dominant over Deira). You'll also note that Edwin, the leader of "Northumbria" in this scenario, was actually from Deira.

 

[Asclepius]

[utahjazz][TLC] I wondered if someone would mention that. Yes, Northumbria actually came into being through a union of Bernicia and Deira, so the faction named "Northumbria" in this scenario should really be "Bernicia". But they united pretty early on, and were known as Northumbria ever after, which became one of the most powerful and important Anglo-Saxon kingdoms. I felt it would be odd to have a scenario about Anglo-Saxons which didn't have Northumbria in it, so I decided to be a bit anachronistic and name Bernicia "Northumbria" (since it was always dominant over Deira). You'll also note that Edwin, the leader of "Northumbria" in this scenario, was actually from Deira.

Isn't it the case that Northumbria was more of a collective name for the kingdoms of Deira, Bernicia and others, which retained a certain sense of independence within a greater Northumbrian kingdom? At least that's how I saw it, admittedly it seems more logical to include Northumbria than not.

 

[utahjazz7]

Load Error; ERROR READING FILE; Missing entry in "Scenerios\Rood\text\PediaIcons.txt":WON_SPLASH_BLDG_Synod; AUDIO

I got this error message upon completing the Great Synod.

 

[viper275]

On turn 3 as Kent, I founded a city using one of my starting settlers on the location of London (it had a VP.) The game crashed and brought me back to the desktop (no error messages) when I founded the city.

Looks like a fun scenario.

 

[Misfit_travel]

Plotinus:

Excellent work. I've played a couple of different civs but with Mercia I've gone the furthest. You have visually attractive scenario with a good assortment of units. I like the challenge of being situated next to a strong power that has superior unit types (at least for the first half of the game).

A minor point, I do think you make it a little too cheap to cut down forests (2 turns with an industrious civ). It's fairly easy to have stacks of slaves / workers cut down a forest every turn for a quick build boost.

I know you mentioned this already that you wanted the tech rate to go quickly, but at Monarch I can trade / discover my way through the first era tech tree within the first 60 turns or so. That struck me as a little fast.

I wanted to thankyou for the scenario work you have done. Its certainly one of the most enjoyable and quick playing scenarios I've seen is some time.

Perhaps you should put together a simple strategy guide to complement the historical guide you supply with the scenario? Something simple like what difficulty level to try / faction to play and some basic strategies for success.

The only other feedback I would offer at this point is to fix the leaderheads in the diplomacy screen. In my mind that is the only major fix needed to make this a full released scenario. I found it quite distracting not to see leaderheads there. (And you have some excellent leaderheads incorporated in the scenario, show them off).

Its a wonderful job you've done. I hope lots of people download it and play it.

Regards
Misfit

 

[Plotinus]

[Asclepius] Gosh, you may be right - evidently you know more about it than I do! I think that as a rule kingdoms of the early Middle Ages weren't really much like states as we think of them. This seems to be the case in the Carolingian world, for example, where empires could split or recombine with relative ease. There were no real capital cities as we know them, a low level of centralisation and evidently little national spirit. So any attempt to model this kind of situation in Civilization is bound to be a simplification at best.

[utahjazz] Have you installed the patch? It should have sorted that out. I've tested it just now and it works fine with me. If anyone else has problems post-patch with the Synod then please let me know, although what the problem could be I'm not sure. By the way, it's fun talking about a "patch" - makes me feel like a real programmer!

[viper275] That's a mystery. It certainly doesn't happen with me (I tried recreating your moves and everything went fine). If anyone else gets a problem like this then please say, but I suspect it's not connected to this scenario. If it is then I really don't know what could be causing it.

[Misfit] Thank you for your comments: I'm glad you like it. I didn't think about changing the time for cutting down forests - perhaps I will change this if I make other changes too. Still, as it is you can do to England what successive civilisations have done: chop down all the forests! As I say, the tech rate should be high for the first era but slow down considerably after this. I would be surprised if anyone managed to research everything in the game without first winning or running out of time. And I probably *will* try to fix the absence of leaderheads in the diplomacy screen at some point since it would clearly be better to have them. But not just yet, I'm afraid: too much on as it is!

It might be fun to have a strategy guide, but I'm sure people can work it out for themselves - I think that's half the fun of any scenario, to be honest. Still, I have given a few hints so far, which ought to be enough to give a few clues! I have to say I'm generally the last person who should write Civ strategy guides. It would be interesting to see what one of those scary expert people who think Sid is too easy would do with it, but that might be a bit intimidating...

 

[The Last Conformist]

It's worth noting that "Northumbria" sounds alot like an exonym (a name given by outsiders). People tend to think of their home as the centre of the world, not as the bit north of something. Without knowing anything more about this particular case, I'm tempted to guess that the Northumbrians were so named by their southern neighbours, and only later picked up the name themselves, perhaps due to a lack of any other catch-all term for all the Anglo-Saxons groups eventually united under the Northumbrian king.

 

[viper275]

Funny, it works okay now.

This is a great scenario, by the way.