CDG Series Discussion Thread

[raider980]

Also I'm thinking of different ways to boost the Lite version and I have a (solid) plan to do that but I especially welcome the views of likely Lite players - what sort of bonuses do you prefer within reason?

I've never met a Lite game that was too easy. I know you don't like to give worker but that's the best help without being op I think. The one where you put some of the enemy workers near the spawn helped. But then that does take away from the surprise factor of meeting other civs.

Besides the worker, biggest issues for me in Deity are happiness and money. I hate the way Civ 5 does happiness so any help there is good. And I often get overrun because I don't have the money to maintain an army.

I've thought about trying to make a Lite game myself by giving the player an extra settler. Hahaha I don't think you'll be up for that but hey, it could be fun. That way I won't be looking at a game where the neighbors have like 5 cities while I still have just one.

 

[Grendeldef]

I was planning of making this Lite more substantial than previous ones so let's call the forthcoming starter Worker a late Xmas bonus. There'll be other stuff, too - no worries. Currently I'm set on giving two freebie techs towards optics and prolly few boats but other stuff is negotiable.

 

[penguin74]

I don't want too many buffs or it won't feel like deity. Maybe a scout and sailing to start. A worker is better of course, but didnt want to be greedy. Can never find the right time to research sailing with naval civs, so that would be nice. Oh, no Shaka near me please. I assume a coastal start is a given. I'll be playing old maps i haven't beaten yet til new one is up. Thanks

 

[Grendeldef]

Shaka won't be present, that's a given and neither will Alex as those have a nasty habit of screwing up a game regularly. Coastal is a bit iffy as it depends on the base map I will use. Original settler won't necessarily see a coast but the sea will be near by and surely the 2nd city should be coastal otherwise this plan of mine isn't going anywhere. Pushing peeps more or less gently towards Optics is the plan but more about that later. I don't wanna starting revealing too much details while the Japan map isn't even released yet.

 

[consentient]

Hey all. Sorry for the absence. I've been EXTREMELY busy at work.

Will make a Greek map with interesting tweaks and handpicked opponents and get it up before Xmas, as a present

 

[Grendeldef]

Bloody awesome and I'm happy to have been wrong while being sceptical about your speedy return. Perhaps you're just Father Xmas bringing early presents for the needy ones. Also, now I can safely say that the Dido experiment will be ready after Alex and Beetle's Japan one.

 

[beetle]

Sounds great! I will post the Oda map after the New Year then. Happy Holidays everyone.

 

[consentient]

EDIT:

I will have to put an alternative map. Not the one I spent dozens of hours labouring over. Cuz Firaxis suck organs. If anyone knows how to fix the problem I describe herein, please let me know so the community might one day be able to play my map.

I get CTD on about T5 on the AI's turn. Is there a way to work out what is causing this?
Mod was made using the World Builder and the Mod Buddy according to directions from the manuals for these appallingly bad tools.

I lovingly made a map of the world of the Alexandrian conquests, added features, resources, cities and units, and then created a Scenario that was fitting for a CDG game.

And now it seems unplayable. HELP please

In the meantime, the map I post will NOT be the one mentioned above. It will be a more bog standard (but I hope, still enjoyable) map using Hellblazer Map v5.

- - -

[strike]OK cool. Some disclaimers are perhaps necessary: -

1. This is taking a lot of hard work, so if you have thoughts about how it could be improved, please DON'T share them, if you value my feelings.
2. This won't be an easy map for DomV or CV, sorry. It should be possible to turtle for SV or DiploV, but ya know, only cuz the AI sucks at getting the job done and doesn't spend its gold, etc. Who knows, it might even be hard to do those.
3. Bottom line, I have no idea how difficult this will be. It could be nigh-on impossible like some of the Acken challenges. Or it might be easier than normal on account of the fact that it isn't a traditional challenge map.
4. I'm not going to invent achievements. The idea is to do what Alex couldn't quite do and liberate/conquer all the lands between him and India. But if others want to agree on a set of other achievements and post those, I'm more than happy to copy and paste them into the OP.
5. The feedback that WOULD be gratefully received is if anyone knows an easier way to make a map than the method I've used. Cuz, man, it's punishingly slow. Thanks Firaxis! [/strike]

 

[beetle]

Thanks @consentient, I am sure I will love it! I am re-playing the GotM first though, then away from my computer until after the New Year.

What is CTD?

 

[Browd]

CTD = Crash to Desktop

 

[beetle]

Thanks @Browd.

@consentient, the Mac OS version will CTD if I do a lot of reloading. My understanding is that it is poor memory management. It even messes up the Finder. So once it triggers, I reboot. It is the only Mac application that I know of in like fifteen+ years that can screw things up that badly.

Obviously first trouble shooting step: Reboot and try again, see if the crash happens exactly the same way.

I presume you have already tried that. Do you still have your Mac? If so, try opening the file on your Mac version of CiV. If not, post the corrupted file here, and I will try opening it, and report back to this thread.

 

[consentient]

Actually, I'm not on a Mac anymore.

But mbbcam has tried the scenario on his map, and he gets NO CRASHES.

So I'm going to post the link here to the Dropbox folder where the files can be found. If people want to test them on their rigs, maybe it will work for some people. Maybe someone can even figure why it crashed for me and Stormtrooper, so we can actually play it. If people want to play it through, then perhaps I'll open a new thread for it, or someone else can do that too if they want.

So here's the link: -

https://www.dropbox.com/sh/oma09q6wxpg2maj/AAB4p_hj-Kmwm4eLOoUNC-zFa?dl=0

You put the consentient folder in the Mods folder, the map in the Maps folder, and the included screenshot will show you how to select the scenario on the Game Setup screen.

For those of you that are able to play, ENJOY!

And if anyone can tell me what I need to do to be able to enjoy it myself, I will owe you a big favour!

 

[mbbcam]

Just to give people chapter and verse, I played consentient's scenario on a 27in iMac running MacOs Mojave (probably not an ideal machine for the task) and I played up to T70 without any problem. I didn't build a lot of units, nor explore the whole of the map, and it is possible that others might experience slowdowns or crashes if their computer's memory is put under greater load towards the end of the game.

I always play with settings that reduce the load on graphics and memory as much as possible. That means minimum settings for most stuff, speech is turned off, and so are leader animations. So is music. I can't stand listening to all the portentous drivel that comes out of the speech files, and the music drives me nuts. Once I've seen the leader animations once I just find them irritating. Dialling things back to minimum might help anyone who experiences crashes.

I get crashes from time to time anyway, and I have a hunch (though no more than that) that these occur when the program is autosaving and writing to virtual memory. But I'm probably completely wrong.

I hope people manage to play it -- it looks fun, and different! Happy New Year.

 

[mbbcam]

Update for Windows players: as an experiment I used Bootcamp to launch Windows 10 on my iMac and managed to play 25 turns of the scenario with no problems at all. As on the Mac version, I used the lowest graphics and other settings. There was no sign of impending doom, though I built many more units (Archers) in preparation for war. I stopped after 25 turns only because I had other things to do.

 

[beetle]

Actually, I'm not on a Mac anymore.

I understood that you were not gaming on a Mac any more, so I was asking if you still had your old Mac available still — to help troubleshoot the issue.

But mbbcam has tried the scenario on his map, and he gets NO CRASHES.

I think that should give you a bit of hope!

And if anyone can tell me what I need to do to be able to enjoy it myself, I will owe you a big favour!

I have not tried to open the files, but one thing I noticed right away is that there are two alex.Civ5map files and that they have different file sizes, and so are almost certainly not identical. I would encourage you to troubleshoot from that bit of detail as you like.

 

[raider980]

I gave the Greece senario a shot and I either crash on T2 or it freezes on Assyria's turn, T2. I used IGE to delete Assyria and it ran fine after that so something may be wrong with them? I am able to repeat it consistently; I started four games and deleted Assyria in each of them on the very first turn and every time it worked after that. I tried a game deleting another civ and that didn't make a difference, it still froze on Assyria's turn.

I turned off Autosave but that didn't make a difference. I turned all graphics settings down to the lowest settings and that didn't make a difference. Mbbcam, how do you turn off sound and leader animations? Do you just mean turn the sound down to zero on the audio tab?

Edit. I am on a Windows Vista computer with an i5 and Radeon 560Ti. I usually am able to run a mix of low and medium graphics settings.

Edit 2. I may have found the issue. For some reason Assur is not designated as a capital city. I used IGE to give it a palace and make it a capital and the game ran fine for a few turns (don't have time to test more tonight). It could be that when Assyria goes to plant its second city, the game gets confused because there is no original capital.

 

[consentient]

Thanks for making some investigations, raider. Whatever is going on, it has been produced by Firaxis World Builder/ModBuddy as those are the only tools I used.

I doubt it CAN be an issue with Assyria, though, since it would surely make ALL games CTD rather than just the Windows and not the Mac, right?

When I played on my Mac I had far more CTD than now running Windows.

I don't have my old Mac anymore. Sold it to a US Airforceman in the summer. As far as the maps, that's what the WorldBuilder and ModBuddy gave me when I followed the FIraxis instructions. Only one map was designed.

 

[KingVercingetorix]

I had the same experience as raider. The game would crash on turn 2 when Assyria takes their turn. I have tested it on two Windows 10 PCs. The first being an Acer Aspire Notebook. It uses a Pentium Dual-Core and Intel HD 2000 graphics. It just about manages to play the game on low settings at 1366x768. Not at all meant for gaming. The second PC is a low-midrange, it uses an i7 3770 and a GTX 660. I play on max settings at 1920x1080 locked 60fps. Both PCs have 8GBs of RAM. The Notebook plays off an HDD and the PC plays off an SSD.

I tried what raider did and added the Palace to Assur using IGE on turn 0, after doing so the game didn't crash on both systems. I kept hitting next turn until turn 30 without any problems. Excellent investigation work raider, I will report back if I start getting crashes.

 

[mbbcam]

@raider980 If my memory serves me correctly, setting the leader quality to MINIMUM turns off the animations. You just get a picture of them. Saves time, apart from anything else. I used to find the Doge quite amusing because I used to work in Venice, and the Venetian dialect was quite comical in this setting. But mostly, hearing the same stuff over and over again got very wearing.

When I tried the scenario on my MacBook, it crashed on T2, but it worked fine on my iMac, so perhaps it just doesn't like laptops Assyria merrily settled all over the place in the game I played up to T70 on MacOS.

 

[stormtrooper412]

I can also confirm that after I gave the palace to Assur, the star appeared next to the name so it became the capital and no crash happened. I played around for 20-ish turns no problem

edit: I have also disabled leader animations but probably nothing to do with it