Hi Curt,
I installed a new instance of ToT on my computer for ToTPP version 0.16 and re-installed the most up-to-date Imp3 v5 files on it (including the new difficulty levels).
I started a new game yesterday, and hesitated at first whether if I should replay as Russia but in the end selected to play as France instead. If Russia was the more backward economically and scientifically, it was also the most homogenous and expansive empire and though it might not have had the most advanced weapons I ultimately found that its sheer size allowed it to produce units on a large scale. As Stalin is reported to have said: “Quantity has a quality of its own”.
France has a different challenge where though it’s more advanced than the former it is the smallest empire of all the nations. Many of its cities are spread out in small groups across the map making it much more difficult to project power locally except in Metropolitan France itself.
As such, I’ve already reached August 1873, and have gone on to conquer all of Italy and Sicily along with Barcelona and Bilboa from the Independents. I’ve equally liberated Amsterdam and Frankfurt from the Kaiser.
Economically, the challenge starts out almost as great as that of Russia but this time I converted as many citizens to taxmen much earlier. Delivering my Mfg Goods to America and a few to Britain along with my conquest have allowed me to maintain a substantial treasury even though I might have been operating at a minus 50 gold deficit per turn. But this has been alleviated by the fact that I just switched to Democracy a few turns back and now have a surplus of 250 gold per turn.
Scientifically, I started at one tech by 188 turns and have progressively improved that rate till I’m now researching one advance per 44 turns now that I’ve adopted Democracy. As I was more advanced, I was able to trade at least 3 or 4 techs and buy 2 others to the point where I now possess 37 technologies.
Otherwise, on a side note I just wanted to report the following:
- I believe you may have forgotten to include the describe.txt file in version 5.
- This time around, I did have issues at the beginning with sprites misbehaving. I noticed that perhaps close to half the units in the @advance_units ‘G’ section didn’t have the “override .SPR file for this unit” flag on.
I’ve since updated all the units in this section and the sprite issue has disappeared (may I recommend you do the same?).
11011110, 00000000, 0, 0000000000000000,0000000000000000,0000000000000000,
10000000 ; Labourers
The latest terrain changes look interesting. Are you prepared to send us a copy so we may test them out?
