[TOT] Basic questions I could find answers to in SL tips

[Konig15]

Nonexhaustive so I may have to ask more

Is there a maximum number of shields you can charge for a building/wonder?

Are there a maximum shields count for a wonder/building the rush-buy system will actually charge? (my experience is it tends to top out at 2000 gold)

Same questions for units?

What is the hard number of specialists you can have before they just stop being anything but entertainers? I think it's 15 but having that in writing would be useful.

Is there a way other than save scumming to make a unit pillage column A of a city's buildings: usually destroying the city walls and high-level economic buildings like banks and stock markets or list B with includes the aqueducts, the sewers and the marketplaces?

And on a player note, is it cheating or roleplaying to save scum in this way in Single-player. I've always considered it roleplaying as king (or queen to tell your commander to tell your general that they have to take the walls intact or we're all going to frelling die when the inevitable counter-attack comes from across the river).

And what are the best ways to ensure lots of barbarians will spawn on their own, all the frickin time when placing your cities? You put wrath of Gaia in the settings, you want to be up to your neck in Barbarians like the Warp just got back from a really sketchy Taco Bell at 4 in the morning and now is communing at the porcelain altar known to the Imperium of Man as the Cadian Gate and it's nothing but Chaos cultists.

Also, how to create Barbarian pirate fleets by event (including pirate raiders that sack settlements) would be good because those are not in the Barbarian papers either.

 

[Knighttime]

I'll weigh in on a few of these at least.

Is there a maximum number of shields you can charge for a building/wonder?

Are there a maximum shields count for a wonder/building the rush-buy system will actually charge? (my experience is it tends to top out at 2000 gold)

Same questions for units?

Remember that the cost you specify in Rules.txt (for anything a city can build) is multiplied by the "# of rows in shield box" value in @ COSMIC (which should really be labeled "# of columns in shield box") to determine the actual number of shields required. So if you say an improvement costs "10", that's 100 shields by default, but you could make it, say, 200 by changing the COSMIC value from 10 to 20.

I've heard (but not tested) that improvement and wonder costs can go up to "99", so 990 shields by default (based on that COSMIC multiplier). Unit costs, on the other hand, supposedly can only go up to "17", at least that's what I saw posted once. I have no idea if that's really true... doesn't seem like it would be too difficult for you to test, though.

I've never heard about a separate rush-buy limit, but 2000 gold seems awfully low -- pretty sure I've spent more than that sometimes. I suppose it's possible, though, that the max cost for city construction projects is really driven by a rush-buy limit. I wonder if TOTPP's removal of the treasury limit would affect this...

Is there a way other than save scumming to make a unit pillage column A of a city's buildings: usually destroying the city walls and high-level economic buildings like banks and stock markets or list B with includes the aqueducts, the sewers and the marketplaces?

Your usage of "pillage" is a little unclear, because that term normally applies to units destroying tile improvements (irrigation, roads, etc.). But TOTPP adds support for new improvement flags in Rules.txt:
; 00000010 - Do not destroy on city capture
; 00000100 - Always destroy on city capture. When both this and bit 2 are set, the result is random.
Is that what you mean? It certainly seems like this would let you sort city improvements into "list A" and "list B" (and "list C") for always / sometimes / never being destroyed.

Beyond that... you guessed it, Lua events. In my Medieval Millennium mod, I introduced various probabilities for different artillery projectiles to specifically destroy City Walls, since that was historically the main goal of the bombardment, and handled all of that in the events.

And what are the best ways to ensure lots of barbarians will spawn on their own, all the frickin time when placing your cities? You put wrath of Gaia in the settings, you want to be up to your neck in Barbarians...

Also, how to create Barbarian pirate fleets by event (including pirate raiders that sack settlements) would be good because those are not in the Barbarian papers either.

It sounds like you know it's possible to add barbarian levels beyond Raging Hordes into Game.txt. I think you could add more than one such level, but I'm not sure how that would actually impact a game. At those higher levels, you tend to get humongous bands, but not necessarily a lot more different bands. You certainly don't have much ability to fine-tune the impact.

In Medieval Millennium, all of the barbarians except those from huts (both land- and sea-based) are created by Lua events. That gives me full control over how many, how often, and where. Once created, they seem to behave the same way as barbarians spawned by the game. Plus, this no longer ties you to the game's complex logic for which unit types spawn based on which techs have been researched. So a fully event-based system of barbs is definitely possible, but (fair warning) it can take a lot of Lua code to make it happen as you intend.

 

[Konig15]

I'll weigh in on a few of these at least.

I will try and respond as best I know how. I'm talking Lua, just vanilla. ATM I'm playing scenarios whether in Civ 2 or TOT. Whether a tile improvement is, a building I think I call it costs 2000 shields or 3200 the costs to build, and this was Blood and Sieges I think capped out at 2000 gold. Because I was playing multiple hotseaters, I was able to get traders through and I was making boockoo FU money and I could afford major rush buys like that.

The second issue of pillage has to do with the very VERY old Ourremier scenario which is basically the Third Crusade to the 15th century month by month and because of how tightly packed the cities are and how hard the units hit if you don't have city walls to protect your units AND that it's Civ2MGE and the they WILL destroy these cities without city walls, winning turns into luck based missions without save scumming. And the AI has two very specific pillage lists, A, which includes marketplaces, aqueducts, sewers entertainments, and B, which includes banks on up, city walls, etc. And they ALWAYS destroy from these two lists.

I do know that with TOTPatch, that buildings can be put on a protected list, and that's great but I'm wondering if there was an older, maybe bug way to do it like from which O clock the conquering unit came into the city from etc. etc. Old 90s ways of doing things.

 

[Knighttime]

Regarding your questions about various limits, I think you should pick the version that you intend to develop in (TOT with TOTPP? MGE with CIV2UIA? I wouldn't recommend anything outside of those two options at this point) and then enable cheat mode, set up some controlled tests, and see what happens. If you can't find the answers clearly documented in the forums, I think most of us who are active here would have to do our own experimenting too. So any details that you can figure out and post for everyone's benefit would be appreciated.

Because I can do Lua, I gravitate to solving most of my problems with that tool -- sorry. I'm not real familiar with all of the MGE-era hacks, but I've never heard of a way to alter city improvement destruction until the TOTPP flags came along. Maybe someone else here knows more than I do.