Battle for Barsoom [John Carter]

[JosEPh_II]

3rd Game started with Custom Scenario (as it should be) and starting to figure out tech tree. The disappearing Date doesn't dissappear now that I'm using the correct start choice (Custom Scenario). And I've realised that it takes 2 turns to advance the date (playing the 1200 turn gamespeed this time).

Finally got a religion and then later a 2nd one, ! So far holding my own and no SoD have shown up yet. Still need to figure out when I can get a Founder across the cavern to settle new land. What's the games Galley equivalent or Bridge building equivalent? Need to figure that out and beeline it.

Enjoyable mod. With time and some fine tuning will be even better.

keldath!

JosEPh

 

[keldath]

thank you my good JosEPh_II,

your feedback means a lot to me.

happy to hear you figured put all the problems.

what did u mean by sod? whats that?

i dont remember at the moment on which tech i allowed settler to cross regions , ill check.
well, since theres no land transport on civ4, and the mod is basically land war, i just gave extra movements to units also to the settler.

what do you think i should do more?
i will take your advice and add a unit class between quad and early units.

what do you think about the other units? are they useful? does they ai build them?


thank you and happy you enjoy it.


im continuing the work, tomorrow ill finish some stuff, if ill have time ill upload a newer version in this weekend.

keep up with the feedback's.

 

[JosEPh_II]

SoD = Stack of Doom (big stack of enemy units that move and attack together.

So far the AI is keeping me on my toes but no invasion yet this time. The AI is getting more Wonders built than I am, I have to do a better job. But part of it is that I can only build a city so often or run out of Gold, normal for most BtS mods. I'm an Expansionist type player for the most part, but C2C is trying to break me from that.

The 2 support combat units especially the one that can bombard adjacent tiles is pretty poor at it's job without promotions and getting it promotions isn't easy. Or I have not figured out how to yet.

Resources, is the human player supposed to get less than the AI? I'm only playing on Prince or Noble Difficulty level. I know this could be just "luck of the Draw" as 3 partial games is a poor basis to judge from. And I have yet to get a Sea start, again luck? But all 3 starts for me have all been center bottom of map. This makes researching for or trying to get barsoomian "fish" and associated buildings impossible for a long time.

As for adding a unit class, an Early city defender would also help to keep early game rush tactics for being the norm. Possibly a str 5 or 6 unit with 50% city defense? And probably a low attack str of 3 or 4 or attack malus like attack str - 30%. It should not be a mechanized unit but a biological one (human, tarsk, the overlords type, or an indigenous creature (mounted or not)).

Hope to get some more play time in this evening.

Keep up the good work!

JosEPh

 

[keldath]

hey, thanks.
i forgot the short for stacks of doom
i like those - if you didn't see much - ill have to fix that :0

ill see how i improve the support units - umak and phobos.

the resources - well thats random, ill ad more types.
fish.. yeah i need to change it, most odds you wont have fish your empire.

ok, ill add some early unit with those attributes.

***
ive made some good chagnes,
early techs are learnt faster now, i did this tuning for every era. same to the city growth rate and such.
now you should develop faster and have more early action.

also, in order to bring more early action, ive boosted up te barbarians, ive made the 3 early unit types - trident, umak and buggy - ive made a unique unit set for the barbs - with higher attributes - like more city attack, and the ability to cross regions, so youll have barbarians attack you more now.

***
finished all the extra civs now, with units and all arts.

i plan on adding 2 more religions, 2 more corps.
unit classes:
a suicide unit type - kinda like missile.
more aerial units.
nuclear bomb.
hidden nationality unit type

after ill finish the xml additions, ill add some mod parts from the community.

 

[JosEPh_II]

As far as I'm concerned if you decide to leave BUG out I would be all for it. Too much code manipulation imo.

One thing I forgot was that you can't load a save game from the Main BtS screen. You have to load the Mod 1st then your save game. When you try from the 1st BtS load screen you get a "303 error expecting 302 or lower version".

As for SoD, Dejah sprang one on me last night. To continue research and building I cheated and used WB to remove her SoD. We are still at war. And she did this just 4 turns after we signed an Open Borders treaty! But she could've been pulled in to it by another AI as Tars and Thuvia asked me to join them in declaring war on Kars, which I did.

John Carter is leading all Civs and I'm in 2nd place as the Okarians (sp).

Hope to get some more time in this evening too.

JosEPh

 

[keldath]

JosEPh_II,
love your reports

the save load thing - i think its just something kmod does (the save version is defined in the altglobatdefines.xml file.

but - i use "Civilization IV Mod Chooser", i use it to load bts with what ever mod i like , so no trouble there.

u little cheater hehe.
i bet you would like my work so far.
if you wish it, i would be happy to pass you the current updates ive made, so maybe if you where going on starting a new game soon, you can start with the new one.

just tell me if your interested.


my latest - i got in 2 more religion types.

***

made a new map - small world size.
gonna do another standard or 2
and a large map.

 

[JosEPh_II]

JosEPh_II,
love your reports

the save load thing - i think its just something kmod does (the save version is defined in the altglobatdefines.xml file.

but - i use "Civilization IV Mod Chooser", i use it to load bts with what ever mod i like , so no trouble there.

u little cheater hehe.

Just beta testing!

i bet you would like my work so far.
if you wish it, i would be happy to pass you the current updates ive made, so maybe if you where going on starting a new game soon, you can start with the new one.

just tell me if your interested.

Yes, Interested!

my latest - i got in 2 more religion types.

***

made a new map - small world size.
gonna do another standard or 2
and a large map.

Would like to see a large map.

Dejah sent another stack and would sit on top of a resource outside a city. I just turtled in and waited to see if she would attack any city. I had 3 of the "walker" OOla type units I would Paradrop to the next city when she would move the stack. This went on for sometime till I got the Quad and Med Ulma. Then I was finally able to gather enough Quads, tred marks, and ulmas to finally start whittling her stack down.

Dang woman had a whole empty section next to her Empire, which she could've been settling, but instead crosses the entire map to attack me!

Still learning.

JosEPh

 

[keldath]

hey,

i dont have time to write - but ill load you the new version ,

also, dont play with random events on - it causes a crash with partisans....i just found it out.

also,
ill make you a large map today then no problems.

***
ok, im uploading the new version now just for you
i write what i added in the "todo" file.
usually i dont keep track on the changes ive made, since i tweak a lot of the xml every time.

tomorrow ill send you the large map, since i didnt created it yet (it actually takes me like an hour to create a map, its fast process .

i hope the oasis and radiation features will come and go in the game, also i hope the barbarians will be more trouble now ( i forgot to change the lion by the way..).

also i havnt got the time to add in new unit classes, but i changed the ones of the early times - so you can cross regions early in game with some units.
i think for next version i will check the efficiency of some unit classes - the umak and support fliers.

hope you will like the new build.

link in your pm soon.

 

[JosEPh_II]

Started new game with 1.1 on standard map. Selected 9 AI 1200 turn game, by 300 turns only 4 AI and myself have survived the Barb onslaught. (and I had to use WB twice to stay alive). Barbs had Buggy and Trident while everyone else had spotters. 5 Spotters defending at 1 str in a city is pretty useless as 5 of the AI found out. Maybe spotters need a str 3? Especially since they are defender only. Even str 2 would help and not get killed so fast by the Lions either.

Why did you reduce the grass plot yields? To balance the earlier Canal Pumps? Really missed the hammer yields for production.

Certain buildings (which I forgot to write down) need some and reduction or more .

But 1 game on a new beta does not make a pattern just a single observation.

JosEPh

 

[keldath]

mmm, maybe i made the barbs too strong then.
ill take your advice. for now play with "no barbs" or cheat

i reduced the grasses, since i wanted the ai to clear it more, i want to see the ai uses more of the improvements, so if you have some advice on making the improvement better do tel.

also ive raised minimum city distance to 3 since the map is all land i dont want an overflow of cities.

building needs tweaks yes, but you mean i need more unhealthy ot more healthy?


****
large map half way done

 

[JosEPh_II]

mmm, maybe i made the barbs too strong then.
ill take your advice. for now play with "no barbs" or cheat

i reduced the grasses, since i wanted the ai to clear it more, i want to see the ai uses more of the improvements, so if you have some advice on making the improvement better do tel.

also ive raised minimum city distance to 3 since the map is all land i dont want an overflow of cities.

building needs tweaks yes, but you mean i need more unhealthy ot more healthy?


****
large map half way done

Oh I'll cheat cause I want to get strong enough to attempt some Barb city takeovers.

So you thought the AI was hindered by the grasses decent and values....hmmm........ From what I saw the 1st several games the AI was doing better than me at using tile improvements, so I thought they were doing good with them.

As for 3 distance, it's okay. Either way it was lack of Gold that was keeping me from expanding more and I was behind the AI in number of cities for the most part. And this game I have money but no Civic that allows spending gold to rush a building or unit. At least i don't remember seeing one. And why is Scientific Charter blank like Charter? And maybe it's because I like religions in a game but seems too many Civics have the No State Religion restriction.

Building tweaks: a few more buildings that give or , or reduce some of the buildings that give and . Also 3% faster terraformer or even 6% is rather slow. Have not figured out why these are this low. Now I have been using the 1200 turn game speed, maybe it's just a build cost tweak to speed it up a little bit.

300+ turns in and I just got Quads, is that too slow on research? Don't know cause I've not finished a game yet or gotten that far in the tech tree.

And I suc at building Wonders. The AI is killing me in that race. Especially that one at game Start the Werehouse one. I thought it was a regular building so I started on it 1st and after 7 turns the AI has already built it! I still had 14 turns to go! What's the trick to get it? Got me stumped. Plus I was mad at myself for wasting 7 turns at the games start.

Well that's all I got off the top of my head for now, will post more later.

JosEPh

 

[keldath]

hey dude,

ok good reason to cheat :0

ill check out the civics.
u have gold problem in 1200? humm, i thought theres to much gold at late game, interesting.

also ill mind the building and values you wrote. thanks.

as in my thought in gold - i thought from what i saw, that the tech tree is too fast..ill check more.

well - i like hard ball ai, but ive made some various handicap levels, what you play with?
maybe ive made the leaders of the civs to focus more on wonders, ill check it out.

more tweaks for me!
i love your reports.

****
im not sure youll like this,
but i decided to remove bug mod from the mod, i want to use all of playtpangs python work, his pedia is awesome.
i had some trouble merging his work into the kmods pythons, so i cleaned it, left only karadocs important stuff, and now i can use all of playt work.
im hoping this week end il upload a much richer version, also due to dear joseph II feedbacks.

 

[JosEPh_II]

Leaving BUG out is fine with me. Platyping has some great stuff, but even he doesn't like to test with BUG in a mod. Too much complication and wait time.

In this current game with version 1.1 I have more gold in my treasury than I did with the 2 previous version 1.0 games. So from my view Gold is better in 1.1.

Iirc, this 1.1 game is at Prince level.

As for the wonders I just want to know what it takes to get that 1st one the AI always gets before I can, in the 1st 10 turns of the game. If I don't have a real chance at it I'll just skip it. As for the AI and Wonders it "knows" what to get and I'm still learning so it has an advantage till I get more experience with the mod.

With Father's day yeaterday I didn't get a chance to play, but I think I can get some playtime in tonight.

When the Large Map is ready I'll probably start a new game on it.

JosEPh

 

[keldath]

hey dude,
just woke up, i start my day with your reports

ill upload you the map tonight, in around 12 hours from this post

good day my friend.


***
glad to hear you don't mind for bug removal, ill replace it with platy mods, and some other nice python codes.
i will do more balance work for next release ( ill upload a new build on sutterday) according to your advice's.

****
here it is , specially for you,
i sat for 3 hours to finish this for you today ,

a large map of barsoom.

 

[keldath]

hey the map uploaded b4 isnt good, it crashes on game load, i deleted a line there by mistake, this is fixed.

 

[JosEPh_II]

Sorry for the silence the last 2 days. My youngest daughter delivered her 1st baby last night late (little girl named Sydney). So things have been "up in the air" for the last 36 hours. Maybe tomorrow when things are more stable. (3 hrs of drive time each day).

JosEPh

 

[keldath]

ohh happy day,

i kinda got worried )))))

congraz my friend.

your youngest daughter? huh, ur a grampa?

in hebrew - "mazal tov"

 

[JosEPh_II]

6 times now, I have 4 grown children(2 daughters and 2 sons). My oldest Grandchild(son) is 18 (by my oldest daughter).

JosEPh

 

[Dumanios]

This looks like a rather nice mod.

 

[JosEPh_II]

@keldath,
Started a New game on the Large map last night but did not get to play long. Finally got a Coastal start as I picked a Leader I was not familiar with. ET sort of looking humanoid.

It still amazes me how fast the AI gets to Buggies and Trikes. I guess bee-lining the Light Materials Tech is the optimal path at game start.

And that Starting Wonder Medium Werehouse was again researched by an AI in less than 10 turns on a 1200 turn game. I just don't know Which AI can do this in 7-10 turns.

Starting Cities Need a starting defender unit. And the Spotters also need an Attack value and not be defender only. Have to leave the scout model somewhat for this but I think this mod needs it.

All for now, more later, hopefully.

JosEPh

Ps. One of these days I'd like to know why I could never get Song of the Moon to work. Tried 3 times on 2 different OSs and never got it to start. :/