Dune Wars Mod

[keldath]

davidlallen,

very interesting!
if you set the water imporveent to give water - i think by using the jeckel improvement system - you can make that there must be a distance between improvement of the smae kind - thus the ai woulnd be able to build this one al over! thus it will be req to build the farms near it to get more food!
we could do this!

here: http://forums.civfanatics.com/showthread.php?t=285018
we can set minimum distance between two improvements!

this mod is inside the dune core!
well,
then we need to think of a spice system.

the hovers - i looked through the minarea szie - i saw they all set to -1 - isnt that whats needs to be so hovers will be build anyware?
but hovers are now sea units - so it cant be built on inland cities - can it can move only on water...

 

[The_J]

We can have cities generate fresh water and use vanilla irrigation chaining. I am not sure this is a good idea, I am not sure exactly how it would work. But it seems like we should do "something" to capture the dune feel of limited water.

Telepathics !

A user suggested in the german forum, that it could be a good idea, to allow farms only in the first ring around a city, and i thought, i could just add a AddFreshWater statement after building a city.

 

[davidlallen]

I compared Maniac's dropship to your sandsea hover units. He says his dropship is buildable anywhere, and I can see your hover is only buildable at "ports". The only difference I can see is bCanMoveAllTerrain. In eight hours or so I will do some experiments with this turned on vs turned off. With this turned on, I should be able to see your problems with the AI failing to use them. Maybe that will cause me to give up on the sand sea model again.

I like the idea of requiring space between windtrap improvements as you pointed out. I will try the following. Windtraps should be buildable early, on hills or peak only. There will be a similar building for cities. As an improvement, it will give +2 food, so the AI should be interested in building it. Then I will require irrigation food bonus to have access to fresh water. This should mean that you cannot get much irrigation going unless you have windtraps.

If we tune this correctly, I think this is better than adding more standalone food bonus plots. Adding more food bonus plots solves the problem of starting positions being too hard; but it does not add to the dune feel.

I see you added patch 4. You had been discussing a new dll with johny which would have a different set of mods built in. Is this new dll in patch 3? Is it in patch 4? I tried patch 3, and it is still complaining with a python alert that assimilation is required but not available. It runs; but it is very annoying that the very first thing that happens when the mod comes up, is that it throws a python alert. So please let us know if you are planning another patch soon with a different dll, or not.

 

[keldath]

hey david,

ok ill be wating your reports on the hovers.


sounds good - we can set somthing up with the windtraps.


i have indeed been talking to johny, and he sent me anew sdk, but im waiting on it, i need to test it more.
but theres no more or less mods there - its just a structural change.

patch 3-4 are similar - only difference is sand sea and land mass.
but its weird that your getting a python error on assimilation - cause i removed it actually!
perhaps i forgot to remove something, ill turn on python errors and see what happens.

ive changed many stuff in the patches,
like removed waves,
change names - hornets are now thopters and thopters are now hornets.
removed some bug components likecivalerts that was annoying.

 

[davidlallen]

In another thread, I was trying to find a way to allow civs to trade, without building long roads across deep desert.

Look at the Astronomy technology, which allows trading over ocean plots. It can be done for every terrain, so just make a dummy technology, which allows trading over all terrain types, and give it all civs for free.

That would be cool, but maybe a little too powerful. I do not see that in the xml. What are the related tags? Maybe we could have two techs, an earlier one which allows trading across everything except deep desert, and a later one which allows trading across everything. But, does this tag really allow trade routes at any range, including all the way across the map? What are the limitations?

 

[Tholish]

In TechInfos

			<TerrainTrades>
				<TerrainTrade>
					<TerrainType>TERRAIN_OCEAN</TerrainType>
					<bTerrainTrade>1</bTerrainTrade>
				</TerrainTrade>
			</TerrainTrades>

I tested it with my FutureMod by having the Spaceport tech give this to all terrains, including ORBIT and SPACE and it works like a charm. I had a city on Venus with iron and aluminum and another on Titan with oil and they shared resources. It would most definitely work in your Dune mod as specified.

 

[davidlallen]

Sorry, I should have done a couple minutes more research before posting that. I found the tag and looked it up. But still, I am not quite sure how it works.

Does it allow automatic connection of my resource to my city? For example, suppose I find oil on a land square, adjacent to coast, and I build a refinery; is it automatically connected?

Does it allow resource trading with all the other civs where any of my cities, can trace a path on these terrains, to any of their cities?

It is interesting to think more, but if we made a tech which listed all the terrains, then instantly every resource is connected and every other civ is tradeable, so no roads are ever needed. That may be too powerful. If we leave off deep desert from the list, still most civs can trace a path via desert waste ("coast") and roads would become mostly useless.

Can anybody think of a good way to use this capability, which does not make it too powerful?

 

[johny smith]

Well I think spice needs a rethink in general. What should spice give you again? Would there be any point of actually having a way to have a unit pick up the spice and bring it to a city? I mean if there are no roads and no terrain globally for trading. Then would have to be some improvement making something that has to be transported. The only way I can think of off the top of my head. Probably could be something better though.

 

[Tholish]

I tested it in my mod again. You still have to have an improvement, but no road to it (as with Fish), and it allows trade of bonuses with other civs but only if both have the same tech. I had Tokugawa with Uranium on Mars and I had Oil on Callisto. He had Spaceport tech and I didn't. Until I got Spaceport tech we could not trade. I built a mine on Superconductor inside my cultural borders but no road to it, and it showed up in my city screen. So, it's just like turning all specified terrains into coasts for trade purposes.

 

[keldath]

hey guys,
glad your trying to figure out trade,

hope youll have something,
mean while me and johny, thought of a use for spice:

1. "spice monopoly" victory = spice gives a certain score every few turns, the more resources you get - the more points youll have, victory achived when turn time ends - civ with highest score - wins.
1.1 we can somehow incorporate spice score into other victories - like dominations - in addition to 66 domination - a certain amount of points.

ai would likely go to war over spice - and will never trade it.

2. harvesting spice - use a units action - to automate it, to go to nearest spice improvements back and forth to closest city, each time it gets to a city - it adds spice to a stockpile (could be hard to do).

3. spice improvement spawns a speial units every now and then, something like a great peaople unit that can either: fight/build a special building/give uniqe promotion/replace great general function.

4. make more spice required buildings and units, maybe a spice victory with ceratin building that must have spice withing city limits (using vicinity mod).


thats it for now,
pesonally like the spice victory.

 

[davidlallen]

Spice victory is a great idea, after all "he who controls the spice, controls the universe". Not quite sure what this means in terms of game mechanics however. There are only a tiny number of spice resources on the map, and they are randomly distributed (today), so you might have to conquer everybody anyway to get them all.

About trade and roads, the following might work.

- At low tech levels, you have to build roads, and roads are *unbuildable* on desert waste and deep desert.

- When you get hovering (thank you for moving that later in the tech tree in patch3) then you get automatic trade for all terrains except deep desert. This means you do not need to build roads anymore, all your resources automatically connect, and you can trade with anybody else who also has hovering. It is possible that one or two civs may be isolated from each other, so it is not necessarily all civs; but most of them.

- When you get a later tech which allows building deep desert units, then you get automatic trade everywhere.

This meets the goal of avoiding roads through the desert, but it also avoids roads at all except in the early game. That may be OK, it sounds like it is worth trying anyway.

 

[keldath]

well we could always increase the spice appeance, if wanted ii can have tons of tons of spice on the map

can you write something like this?


well,

i can add it to next build or make a seperate for you to test, sounds nice - but do you want roads to be obsoleted?


***********

ok here is a great idea by johny:

1. each civ has a uniqe corporation that it starts the game with ( a corporation agaent at game start).

2. these corporations, consume only spice.

3. each of this corps give different bonus - commerence hammers, another resourse - or special commerence types by johny - health happiness.

4. the more spice an empire will have - the more bonus presentage the corp will give (this makes it worth while for cvi to get more spice)

5. spice cannot be traded between civs.

6. thses special corps, cannot be spread - need to find a mechanice - that it can be only on cities your civ controls - not enemy .

7. you start the game with one agent - and you cannot build more.


tjses corporations - will be in addition to the excisting ones - inless someone can make a screen for them (not that important).


tell me your thought.

 

[johny smith]

Well it is really late here. I discussed quite a bit with keldath about some WoC things that were added in the WoC Full version that are not in the dll I made so far.

Basically there are more commerce type going to look at. The WoC added 5 commerce types. Well can rename them in text. You can anything that produces commerce to produce these new ones. So if you wanted to make a spice victory it would be possible to write a victory condition on how much spice commerce was made like culture or whatever. I was thinking basically converting the spice resource to a spice commerce like the value being exported through a corporation.

Now how the AI handles all of this still needs to be looked into more. But that was a summary of what I was thinking. Maybe too much work for AI. Will just try it out and see. There is an AI weight in the xml for commerces so need to find out what it does. Keldath is going to look at it tomorrow. Anyway I hope it does not sound too far off.

 

[koma13]

ok here is a great idea by johny:

1. each civ has a uniqe corporation that it starts the game with ( a corporation agaent at game start).

2. these corporations, consume only spice.

3. each of this corps give different bonus - commerence hammers, another resourse - or special commerence types by johny - health happiness.

4. the more spice an empire will have - the more bonus presentage the corp will give (this makes it worth while for cvi to get more spice)

5. spice cannot be traded between civs.

6. thses special corps, cannot be spread - need to find a mechanice - that it can be only on cities your civ controls - not enemy .

7. you start the game with one agent - and you cannot build more.


tjses corporations - will be in addition to the excisting ones - inless someone can make a screen for them (not that important).


tell me your thought.

Sounds interesting. First I prefered having spice as a feature you can harvest but this could work too. Spice have to be more important, in the books spice is the reason why houses care about Arrakis. How about making this corporations your main income and reducing all other incomes. Trade and population would have less impact on economy instead it would be more important to control as many spice resources as possible.

2. the kopma new code - has indeed tons of peaks.

True. I will reduce mountain rate.

good one koma! nice background!
youll make for sea aswell right?

I can make water look like desert but I don't know how to change blue sky.
http://uploaded.to/file/j70617

a new terrain? your improving the texture? how nice!

Only textures. If possible I try to stay away from xml.

 

[keldath]

damn i cant fall asleep,

great idea koma,

i totally agree - having the unique corporation as the main income will be more realistic,

it might be a bit tricky though, this means i have to lower every other economy bonus and balance it with the corp.

cool,
reducing the peaks will be nice.


thats ok, i can leave with the sky - the water is more substantial...



sure thats what i had in mind - i would love that the brown terrain would be replaced to a more bright sand color, youve done very good work with the deep desert terrain so i trust that you can make more like it

tommorow ill work on these corp,

you are welcomed to start give ideas for the corp names, and features for each house.

 

[koma13]

great idea koma,

i totally agree - having the unique corporation as the main income will be more realistic,

it might be a bit tricky though, this means i have to lower every other economy bonus and balance it with the corp.

Yes I know, it's much work but it will force players to develop new strategies. Biggest issue I had with dune wars in early versions that it was too much like vanilla civ4 just with a new paintwork. Davidallen's work is going in the right direction (but need better art work ), in general we need more consistent and unique content. I first noticed Dune mod when Phoenician posted his artwork and I think we should try to reach that quality level with all parts of Dune wars.

 

[davidlallen]

Augh! It seems that patch3 is unplayable. Maybe it is just me. But I deleted my mods\dune wars area and reinstalled the original release plus patch3. When I found a city, it refuses to accept any production. When I click end of turn, it asks me what I want the city to produce; fine, I select something to produce, say, Barracks (5 turns). Next turn, I click end of turn, it asks me again what I want to produce, and one of the choices is Barracks (5 turns). No production has happened, and it forgot what I selected. Furthermore, when I use the city screen itself to select what should be produced, I click on one of the available icons, and it does not get added to the queue.

I did a limited test 8 hours ago and it seemed to be working, but that was when I just fortified my initial colony pod so I could go look at things. It seems completely non-working on closer inspection.

Is anybody else using patch 3? Is it working for you?

 

[davidlallen]

Fall from Heaven does not have an AI for land transports.

For the record, Planetfall has the Dropship. That's technically a naval unit which can move over all terrain. I also made it buildable in inland bases. I have not seen the AI do drops on inland bases, but because it's a naval unit, the AI knows how to use it like it can any other sea transport. So if you guys keep the deep desert as 'oceans', you could go for the Planetfall approach.

I tried this, and I cannot get it to work. The only difference I can see between the Dune light hover and the Planetfall dropship is use of bCanMoveAllTerrain. I added this to the light hover. But still I can only build it at coastal cities. I give myself the tech and two cities, one on the coast and one inland. The coastal one shows the hover as an available unit to be built, and the inland one does not.

Is there something else I need to change to make this work? I also tried this on a vanilla game by locally changing the galley to bCanMoveAllTerrain, and it did not work for that either.

 

[davidlallen]

Sigh. Not much success today. Patch 3 seems broken to me as posted above. I am looking forward to the new terrain textures / mapscript from koma13. I have not thought much about the spice handling you guys are discussing. I have a working windtrap improvement but when I plug it into dunewars (patch 1), the fresh water immediately disappears. It seems one of the dozen or so mods inside dune wars is cleaning it up, and I am not sure how to debug this.

Previous issues, still present in patch 3:

6. The Emperor and Irulan LH pictures are still skinny.

7. The diplomacy screen always generates a python popup about RTTI. I investigated this more, but still failed to fix it. In the standard revolutionsDCM mod, the file gameinfo/civ4diplomacyinfos.xml contains about 100 lines of new code. I pasted this into the dunewars file, but this did not change the error. Maybe using a different dll with less revolutions stuff in it will fix this; but I still see the error in patch3. In case it is helpful, I have put the 100 lines into file CIV4DiplomacyInfos-fragment.xml in the attachment.

9. The flags all have black backgrounds

11. In civ4civilizationinfos.xml, Bene Gesserit <adjective> is still "German"

24. Workboats still have default name and unit art, sailing on sand is silly

33. Thumper promotion should no longer give a movement increase

39. I mentioned I did not like "lvl 1, 2, 3" in improvement names. For mining improvements, how about "Surface Mine", "Deep Mine" and "Core Mine". Then you can change existing "Pit Mine" to "Mining Station" so the series does not get confused. Still need to think about windtrap and refinery names.

47. New LH and button for spacer guild guy. The button from johny is there, but the larger LH image is missing. See post 126.

New issues:

49. Water button is empty and brown. Visible in sev-o-pedia and also when using resource circles (alt-c) in main screen.

50. Turning on grids causes a crash. Worse, the fact that grids are on is stored before the crash, so when I bring up the game again it immediately crashes. The only solution was to delete my mods\dune wars directory and reinstall. If there is a way to turn off the grids option outside the game, please let me know.

51. In the ocean model (patch 3), I tried to get hovers buildable anywhere. I added bCanMoveAllTerrain, but that did not help. I have posted above and also PM'd Maniac, the author of Planetfall, to see if he can help. I can't see using the ocean model without this; hovers must be able to move on all land.

52. With python alerts on, there is still a python alert thrown when the game first starts. It is different than before, but still disappointing. In this case it happens even with the BUG options for revolutions turned off; the last line of the alert refers to GAMEOPTION_ASSIMILATION. So I guess Assimilation is still in there, at least a little bit. Since the Revolutions options summary screen does not appear, initialization must not be completing, and I wonder if this is what makes the mod unplayable.

53. My fault, but thumpers are not working in patch 3. This is because I left out a step. I forgot to give you the related files. In the attachment, please use fragments for artdefines, unitclassinfos, and unitinfos, and paste them into their related files. Also please put the nif and dds into new directory art/units/thumper.

54. Several weird things with improvements. These can be placed in coast/ocean but their related improvements cannot be: Slig, Smoke Tree, Inkvine. These do not have any related improvements at all, so they cannot affect cities or be traded: Inkvine, Minerals, Shigawire. Sappho and Smoke Tree have Foundry as their related improvement; these are both in the plant family and a foundry does not seem to make much sense.

55. In the upgrade tree displayed in the sev-o-pedia, I notice that infantry can upgrade to quad, which seems weird, and also lasgun trooper can upgrade to chouhada. Both of these are a change of unitcombat. This is not "illegal", just "weird" that an infantry would upgrade to a wheeled unit.

56. I have upgraded the worm and storm AI to work on either the land model or the sea model. Please include attached cvgameutils.py and cveventmanager.py into assets/python.

57. Please make sure UNIT_WORM1 has TerrainImpassables for TERRAIN_PEAK and TERRAIN_HILL, and not for TERRAIN_DESERT_WASTE or TERRAIN_DEEP_DESERT. With different patches, this seems to come and go. Or it may just be me, applying patches inconsistently.

 

[koma13]

7. The diplomacy screen always generates a python popup about RTTI. I investigated this more, but still failed to fix it. In the standard revolutionsDCM mod, the file gameinfo/civ4diplomacyinfos.xml contains about 100 lines of new code. I pasted this into the dunewars file, but this did not change the error. Maybe using a different dll with less revolutions stuff in it will fix this; but I still see the error in patch3. In case it is helpful, I have put the 100 lines into file CIV4DiplomacyInfos-fragment.xml in the attachment.

I looked into it. I think someone mixed up eComment and iComment.
In CvDiplomacy.py line 324:

self.diploScreen.addUserComment( iComment, iData1, iData2, self.getDiplomacyComment(iComment), args)

line 328:

AIString = self.getDiplomacyComment([B]eComment[/B])

I printed out some e/iComments:

USER_DO_NOT_BOTHER_US
-1

USER_DIPLOCOMMENT_WAR
57

USER_DIPLOCOMMENT_ATTITUDE
93

USER_DIPLOCOMMENT_NEVERMIND
63

USER_DIPLOCOMMENT_EXIT
97

As you can see iComment for USER_DO_NOT_BOTHER_US is set to -1. I don't think that is good. I looked for USER_DO_NOT_BOTHER_US in CvDiplomacy and it appears in line 312 and is related to revolution mod. When I remove that part (308-315), Diplomacy Screen shows an exit button.