Rhye's Catapult

Ok, here's my initial report up to 400BC playing England.

England (me) has 6 cities so far. I've built the Pyramids, Great Lighthouse, and Stonehenge. London is an absolutely amazing city. Seems almost overpowered to me. I'm not super crazy about the flag for England, would prefer the normal St. George cross.

Rome has 2 cities, but it got really screwed up when it was founded. There was a random barb city named Chehalis one tile north of the Tiber when Rome (the civilization) was created. So Chehalis was absorbed by Rome and it then sent its settler over to found a city one tile NE of the Alps. That city is the one called Rome, but its not the capital. I wonder if there would be some way for you to restrict the creation of barb cities away from certain areas? Rome also founded Confucianism.

Greece has 2 cities, with its second city on the coast of the Black Sea. It seems to me that it is somewhat lagging behind, because its been around for a good while but only managed to build one settler.

Persia has 2 cities, and it also got kinda screwed up with its location. Persepolis (the capital) was founded on the northern coast of Asia Minor, and Pasgarade is on the upper part of the Tigris. I think the reason that Persia may have settled so far away from its home is that there is an Indian city in Persia right now. Perhaps it didn't flip as it was supposed to when Persia was founded?

India and China are doing pretty well, with 5 and 6 cities, respectively. No major issues there, other than the possible Indian city which didn't switch to Persia.

Egypt has 4 cities, but it has gone crazy with the religions. It founded Hinduism, Buddism, Jewdism, and Christianity. That just seems a bit excessive to me. No one else has even had a chance really.


This new approach is definitely going to take some getting used to. The game so far hasn't been nearly as exciting as a regular RoC game was with all of the civs there to start with. I'll see how it goes as I play further.
 
Hello, Rhye!

Are you doing well? :)

I and two pals started a multi-game yesterday, and played it until 1250 or so.

Game comments:

1.
Game runs smoothly, even with this huge size - I guess this is positive for the 1.61 :king:

2.
Er, not all that smooth: when a civ collapses and dies, we have OOS :(
But with re-join, we could go on each time :)

3.
We played Rome, Greece, England. I played Greece. Baron level.

As Greece, I put the third city into today's Turkey - and when Persia appeared, it put Persepolis 2 tiles from my 3. city and soon the city joined Persia... It was dramatic! :eek: But game-wise - OK :goodjob:

Rome was also a human player and he found it too easy to get away with the new Europeans:
Germany, France, Spain, Russia. I don't know much about the details but perhaps it is those damn legions...?

Strange event:

When Egypt collapsed, we had OOS, we rejoined and she, Egypt was back again! :confused:
And then it colapsed again in about AD 1100-1200...

Russia: It appeared arouund AD 700 and got wiped out in one turn by Rome (human). Russia appeared again in ca. 1000 - is it intended, to make re-appearances?

My thoughts:

As an experience and playing, it is weird to see that nations come and go...
I just don't know how I handle it emotionally and er, psychically... and as a player...
Eg. Egypt is leading... then suddenly it dies, disappears...
what should be my relation to Egypt?
Will she ever attack me in her short "life"?
Should I care about our diplo-relation?
Or trade?

About ancient empires being gone:
I see that the ancient Empires are dying and disappearing in history.
Now, my feeling is that I do not wish to "lose" Egypt or China as players.

How about making them kind of transiting from one phase to another?
I mean at one point it could be that the ancient Egypt is "gone"
but
in the same turn it is re-created as a new Egypt with a different empire-name and land area and cities. Cities also could have a different name.

Or is it so that Egypt switches to Arab?
Ok, but how about China? And Rome?...Others? :)

Overall, I am excited and feel that there is something GREAT evolving here, Rhye! :goodjob:
 
Rhye, can you give me advice on what device to use to have a look at the python file? :)

EDIT:

I love this debug mode! :king:
Is this the way to make it for every mod to debug?
 
Test Game 1 – England

See my questions and what I find problematic below in bold

Civ appearing:

BC 4000
China, India, Egypt

BC 1960
Greece

BC 725
Rome – start with learning Archery (I mean, that early tech)???

BC 600
Persia, Japan – start with learning ancient techs?
Persia – Madras (occupied) is Capital?

BC 275
Mongolia – start with learning ancient techs? Nanjing (occupied) is capital?

Playing with England is by far too easy, I guess, it is AD 1 and
I could have Astronomy in 15 turns...
I tried to go historic and founded Christianity... in BC 1080...

EDIT:

OK, I see that the "new" civs are no that underdeveloped, I find I can even trade techs with newcomer Germany or France :)
 
okay let's see....

1 - as the python code contains random variables, the game is not intended for multiplayer. For now. I should convert them to another format to avoid OOS. I will do sooner or later.

2 - Persian spawn always changes because India occupies that region. In fact, what I asked to test is: how far do they found cities from the capital? This is important, very important for the overall result.

3 - And that AI tweak, it depends from this. I saw where I should change the code, but first I wwant to understand if that variables are the only ones to affect that behaviour

4 - Barbarian cities can be founded by python events. And if we disable settlers production for barbs, we get the completely static approach

5 - Soma, if there's something wrong in the starting techs, please open python file and check from line 1043 on

6 - I know that ancient times aren't too exciting - because there are too few ancient civs. Hopefully this will change in Warlords.

7 - We can discuss the death of civs as much as we want, and even try to disable it (but will latter civs suffer from this? Probably, if we don't fix the cities distance from the capital that as you can see, is the main issue)
 
Test game with England - AD 1150

I find that Germany had 3 cities at start -
in "cascade" it forced France to have only Paris in "France",
the other two cities of Louis went to "Spain",
and in cascade Spain could have only one city...
... is this OK?

As I see it, newcomer civs should have perhaps more or all of "dated" techs,
beacuse they are way behing in what they learn...

(now I will stop, as there is family and Eastern...
see you tomorrow)
 
Rhye said:
2 - Persian spawn always changes because India occupies that region. In fact, what I asked to test is: how far do they found cities from the capital? This is important, very important for the overall result.

But Rhye, Persia started ith having (stolen?) an Indian city, Madras as Capital,
way far from "Turkey", their homeland...

As much as I see, new cities are founded 3-4 tiles away from capital
 
V. Soma said:
But Rhye, Persia started ith having (stolen?) an Indian city, Madras as Capital,
way far from "Turkey", their homeland...
Wow, wow, wow. Am I missing something obvious? Isn't Persia's homeland in well, Persia? Did you intend to have them spawn in Turkey? Because I just assumed that that was a bug of some sort. In my game it spawned in the north coast of Turkey, and didn't touch an Indian city in modern-day Iran.

I wonder if you could do something with the fall of civilizations where they lose maybe 75% or their cities randomly instead of completely disappearing? I think that might help keep the game a little bit more interesting by having more civs in play. Perhaps you would guarantee that they kept their capital city, I'm not sure.

I also think that it would be good if you could somehow script the founding of barbarian cities. It just seemed bad to me how a barb city randomly spawned near the Roman starting location so the capital of Rome became Chehalis. We should have a litte bit of discussion about this.

Would there be some way for newly spawned civs to be able to check what tech level their neighbors are at when determining what techs they should get? I know I brought this up before, but it really would be the best method if it was possible. I think it is almost impossible to try and guess how far along the tech advancement is for each game, it depends on so many things. We had the same issue with RoX where some people refused to trade with the AI so their whole game lagged way behind technologically.
 
WHOA!!! Today seems AMAZING! Fisrst off, The SDK and v. 1.61 patch were released when I came online and now THIS!!! *hides away in room for a while*
 
Grr. The patch once again caused weird errors, forcing me to delete everything. And now I can't find my install disk. Always with me, the bugs.

From what I saw, in the few turns it was possible to play without the interface (not in cities, not for units, no interface whatsoever. Oh, and the tech advisor popped up right at the start, with all sorts of .py exceptions), everything seemed okay.

Terrain issues I saw: Finland is too big, and eats the Baltic alive, Greece is too small and a tad deformed, the Rocky Mountains should be evened out a bit with hills because it is patchy right now, and a line of mountains almost entirely cuts off the Horn of Africa from the rest of the continent. There is only a single square from which you can access it.

Popping open the world builder on turn one, and seeing only two other civs in all that map space was the lonliest I have ever felt in civ.
 
Can i join the test team ?
 
I agree that the Baltic is a bit lacking. And I agree with Aeon that Greece does have some issues. I would recommend that the western-most tile of Java be deleted so that Java and Sumatra aren't connected. I realize that it is very difficult to make a map look perfect though, especially with these square tiles ;)

As I went along in my game a weird thing popped up in 250BC stating that the Mongol civilization had already been destroyed. I checked in debug and it looked like the Mongols had flipped a Chinese city to themselves, and that city was now controlled by the barbarians.

In 50BC the Germans were founded in Berlin. They started with a good number of axemen and a free settler, so that was all good. One problem is that Berlin starts with no culture, and an already established Roman city near it is taking up a lot of its tiles. Perhaps you could set new civilization's capital to have some culuture when they are founded? The other main issue with Germany is that they are way, and I mean way, behind technologically. I'm posting a screenshot of how far behind they are, its like they started with nothing almost. It would be really good if we could give techs dynamically.

Greece just seems to be doing quite badly. I don't really know why, but they still just have 2 cities in 1 AD (actually they have a settler wandering around too, so it may become 3 soon, but I still think thats pretty lackluster.) Maybe Athens should be improved.

Persia and Japan both still only have 2 cities also, which is somewhat concerning.

I've uploaded my save and some screenshots in case anyone wants to take a look. The year is 1 AD, and its on Duke difficulty.



Oh by the way, I love the new menu music Rhye!
 
Persia should spawn in Persia. If it can't, then it browses a broader region, that includes Turkey as well (Persian maximum extent)

The 1st thing I'll do now is add barbarian cities that will hopefully make early civs life harder and less lonely at the same time

I'll see what I can do on the map, but it will be hard to find more space for greece, baltic etc.
 
Gunner said:
I wonder if you could do something with the fall of civilizations where they lose maybe 75% or their cities randomly instead of completely disappearing? I think that might help keep the game a little bit more interesting by having more civs in play. Perhaps you would guarantee that they kept their capital city, I'm not sure.

I support this idea or something like that :)

Gunner said:
I also think that it would be good if you could somehow script the founding of barbarian cities.

I support this idea or something like that :)

Gunner said:
Would there be some way for newly spawned civs to be able to check what tech level their neighbors are at when determining what techs they should get? I know I brought this up before, but it really would be the best method if it was possible. I think it is almost impossible to try and guess how far along the tech advancement is for each game, it depends on so many things. We had the same issue with RoX where some people refused to trade with the AI so their whole game lagged way behind technologically.

I wholeheartedly second this. I would say that new civs perhaps should have
ALL the techs known up to that day, since they would be weak all the same economically
and slow on joining the tech race.
 
Ok, I've played a bit farther now, its 840 AD.

So far Egypt has been the only civ that has fallen, and I was quite happy with how it turned out. One problem though is that there were some wandering units in the Sahara from India and Persia who went straight for the new barbarian cities and took them. I didn't mind the Persians doing it so much, but it was really weird to see India have a city on the Upper Nile. This happened around 720 AD.

France was created in 500 AD by taking one of my cities. I was fine with that, it seemed like it worked as intended. Then I saw that France didn't recieve any units! All the city had in it was one archer. So I just attacked it a couple of turns later and took it back over. I think this is probably what happened to Mongolia when they were eliminated so early too. I think a new civ should get free units even if it is taking a city. And if I had for some reason decided to not conquer the city, I don't think it really would have had much of a city radius at all due to be surrounded by my culture on all sides. So once again I propose that new civs should somehow be given extra culture to start with in their capital if its possible to do so.

I was very happy with the development of the Arabians. Mecca was created on the South coast of the Arabian pennisula, but they quickly conqured a former Egyptian city which occupied the real location of Mecca. They started with a good number of Camel Archers which are giving them a nice army to work with. They also are pretty good tech wise, they are even ahead of me in some areas. They also founded Islam which was a nice touch.

Spain was founded in 740 AD by taking a Roman city on the northern coast of Spain. Once again, they didn't get any free units so they only had a single archer as their entire army. They were also super far behind in techs, they didn't even have many of the basic ones like the wheel and such. So I being the nice guy I am gave them a whole bunch of techs to bring them up to speed. I did the same thing with the Germans ealier.




I don't think whatever you did to make the AI settle its cities closer together has worked Rhye. Overall the cities all seem pretty spread apart, especially the ones which were founded by the Germans, Romans, and Greeks. Those three have really been spreading out.

I really like the idea of having scripted barb cities appear. It will give you something to do in the early game thats kinda exciting. I think some places that need them are Carthage, Jerusalem, Berlin (this one can be guaranteed to turn into the Germans when their time comes), Tenochitilan (however you spell it), Cuzco, and possibly some city in Gaul. By pre-placing them you can also guarantee that they'll be given correct names, not Hittite or something stupid like that.
 
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