Kailric's M:C Journal

Kailric

Jack of All Trades
Joined
Mar 25, 2008
Messages
3,100
Location
Marooned, Y'isrumgone
Here I will jot down ideas, bugs I find that need fixing, additions I think would be cool, and my thoughts on the mod and how things are progressing while playing. I am always forgetting stuff so maybe this will help me with that. Anyone else can start their own Journal too. I will edit this first post frequently.

-My huntsman topped a hill and spied a Lion resting amongst some scrubby trees and I thought to myself, "wouldn't it be cool if Huntsman could keep track of the types of Animals they have killed and gained some kind of bonuses for killing them all. Wouldn't it be even cooler if they could capture some animals that you can then give as gifts to other players like Henry III received a Polar Bear from King Haakon of Norway in 1252.

-AI needs to assign guards to traders after the Viking Age to protect them on their travels

http://forums.civfanatics.com/showthread.php?t=332050
 
After my last play through I have added a ton of things on the todo list for tweaks and additions. Like I changed the Stables to give a bonus to Cattle/Sheep/Horse production in the field instead of consuming food to produce. And the Ranch will actually increase their Storage by 100.

I have a few more "Wouldn't it be cool if":

-After a city is destroyed it leaves behind Ruins. Scouts could then search through the ruins for any stashed or hidden treasure.
-Archers shot Fire Arrows that set Catapults and Siege Engines ablaze and did damage over time
-Groups of Knights had a special ability for a massive Shock effect, or a Super Charge that hurt multiple units in a stack.
-A group of Longbowmen could stop a Group of Knights charge in its tracks :lol:
 
Ahh, man, is the AI in need of an overhaul militarily. So, in my latest game Mansa Musa asked me to go to war with Theodoric and since he is my biggest rival I accept. As noted in my other posts my equipment was scattered about so I just equip some guys with what ever was laying around my cities at the time as I wanted to strike fast sinse Mansa Musa was advancing already. So I barrel off into his territory and right off he has a few single units moving around. I easily pick those off, and then decided on one of his cities to siege. Except I can't siege anything at the moment because Siege Engines can only be built in Military Cities, and the one I do have is so far behind in being able to even build a Siege Workshop that I may as well give up on that idea. So I do what any respectable modder would do, save the game, close it out and then do some remoding.

Catapults and Trebuchet can only be built with the Siege Workshop and only in Military Cities. I think that may be a bit extreme so I mod it so that any city can build Catapults as long as you have a LumberYard and the Tech, and leave Trebuchets requiring Siege Workshops.

Back in the game I have two cities that can start to build Catapults so I set them to crank me out some. Meanwhile, I have my target city flanked and still picking off random solo units. He even sends non military units and wagons past my troops which they easily take out. Once however, I attacked an Infantryman with my Skirmisher, which left him exposed and right next to a well defended city. So, I move in a couple of Horsemen for back up, to help defend my now wounded Skirmisher and most experienced solder I have. The next turn two archers attack from the City killing both my Horsemen, but leave my wounded Skirmisher untouched. Regardless, that was the smartest move they had made so far.

Long story short (still quite long altogether) my catapults finally arrive and we lay siege to the city. He has one heck of a defender there and even after reducing the defenses to 0% my units still have barely any chance at victory. So I send in my catapults to weaken him up. They do a good job and I finally have better than 50% chance to win. We eventually take the city, and that's about where I ended play.

Now, what would a human have done? For one they wouldn't have had lone units rambling around or defenseless units. They would have prepared a counter offensive on my units that where flanking his city in the hopes they could crush my army. The one smart move they made with attacking and killing my horsemen with archers I believe was probably code that I added so that units would venture out from cities to kill nearby hostiles if they stood a good chance.

Anyway, all that said so I wouldn't forget how bad the AI currently is.
 
-My huntsman topped a hill and spied a Lion resting amongst some scrubby trees and I thought to myself, "wouldn't it be cool if Huntsman could keep track of the types of Animals they have killed and gained some kind of bonuses for killing them all.
We could make an animal JIT array. All we need to do is count the number of animals in XML and use that number for an array length. CvGlobals would then keep that length and also an array of UnitTypes, which can be used to look up the unitType for each animal ID.

We can add getAnimalInfo and CvGlobals will then use the array to find the UnitID and look up UnitInfo and return that one, which essentially allow us to use animals like it is an XML of it's own.

We could make hunters get red circles around animals and can get those in fog of war as well. The radius for unseen plots would increase with the number of animals killed, allowing experienced hunters to detect animals on the other side of the hill and such.

-After a city is destroyed it leaves behind Ruins. Scouts could then search through the ruins for any stashed or hidden treasure.
I'm not sure because when you destroy a city, the attacking unit will enter the plot right away and that way search the ruin.

I have been wondering if natives should be allowed to build a native improvement, which gives bonuses to natives. It can then mature into a different kind of improvement if it is used long enough and this improvement can be a goody hut. If we set a minimum distance between goody huts like that, it would mean that natives will slowly replenish goody huts and sending out scouts would be beneficial the entire game.
 
We could make an animal JIT array. All we need to do is count the number of animals in XML and use that number for an array length. CvGlobals would then keep that length and also an array of UnitTypes, which can be used to look up the unitType for each animal ID.

We can add getAnimalInfo and CvGlobals will then use the array to find the UnitID and look up UnitInfo and return that one, which essentially allow us to use animals like it is an XML of it's own.

We could make hunters get red circles around animals and can get those in fog of war as well. The radius for unseen plots would increase with the number of animals killed, allowing experienced hunters to detect animals on the other side of the hill and such.

So, your telling me it can be done:goodjob:


I'm not sure because when you destroy a city, the attacking unit will enter the plot right away and that way search the ruin.

Yeah, some of my crazy ideas are just crazy:crazyeye:


I have been wondering if natives should be allowed to build a native improvement, which gives bonuses to natives. It can then mature into a different kind of improvement if it is used long enough and this improvement can be a goody hut. If we set a minimum distance between goody huts like that, it would mean that natives will slowly replenish goody huts and sending out scouts would be beneficial the entire game.

I think your on to something. It would be nice to have a use for Scouts throughout the game. Perhaps GoodyHuts could have like "prospecting levels" too, where techs and such would unlock new GoodHuty potentials.
 
My huntsman topped a hill and spied a Lion resting amongst some scrubby trees and I thought to myself, "wouldn't it be cool if Huntsman could keep track of the types of Animals they have killed and gained some kind of bonuses for killing them all. Wouldn't it be even cooler if they could capture some animals that you can then give as gifts to other players like Henry III received a Polar Bear from King Haakon of Norway in 1252.
Take a look into Fall From Heaven 2 and its Fall Further modmod. They have a cool system where units can earn special achievements through combat etc, and also enable capturing animals, which you can use to build a Circus or Menagerie in a city (or could potentially gift it via the diplomacy unit gift system if you want.) You wouldn't necessarily have to make it specific to animals, so you could even capture a ship or something or take a prisoner from defeating a unit.

I have been wondering if natives should be allowed to build a native improvement, which gives bonuses to natives. It can then mature into a different kind of improvement if it is used long enough and this improvement can be a goody hut. If we set a minimum distance between goody huts like that, it would mean that natives will slowly replenish goody huts and sending out scouts would be beneficial the entire game.
Yes that sounds good. In old 2071 I did have Alien improvements which could slowly mature and give tile yield increases only to civs with Alien Traditions civic, didn't think of having the later stage also be Goodyhuts though. Having a <iMinRadius> tag in ImprovementInfos would be cool, this would enable you to mod unique improvements that can only be built if there isn't another copy of the same Improvement within an N tile radius.
Originally Posted by Nightinggale View Post
I'm not sure because when you destroy a city, the attacking unit will enter the plot right away and that way search the ruin.
Yeah, some of my crazy ideas are just crazy
perhaps lol :mischief::crazyeye: But if you do want this one option would be to enable goodyhut Improvements that are only searchable by a certain Unitclass you specify (like UNITCLASS_SCOUT for special ruins or UNITCLASS_MISSIONARY for some special religious pilgrimage thingy), so wouldn't be popped if a random unit moves over them.
 
Well the Pope went and censored Apathy and forced me to switch to Ritualistic, which put my kingdom into a bind as I then had to assign workers to produce Religion because of the upkeep. Well played Pope, well played. Starting Upkeep costs seem pretty good, perhaps adding in Per City factors and others on higher tier Civics would work best.

Somethings I noticed while playing...

Bugs or Fixes
-Trading Post need some kind of tutorial added to explain what they are good for
-I need to remove finding Mines in treasures, and remove Prospect Levels
-Sending Spies to investigate needs more explanation and the REFs need better names
-Peddlers and Merchants are the only units that should have the Buy/Sell commands
-As suggested, Upkeep per City factors and others as well
-The Papacy should send an "Envoy" after a few turns instead of waiting for the player to discover the Papacy. The Envoy will not be a physical unit.
-We need Adviser popups to explain Upkeeps and perhaps warn the Player when they have a deficit
-Upkeep costs needs to be displayed while in the City Screen so you can more easily decided where to put your workers, I kept having to close out the City Screen in order to see this info
 
Good timing. I was about to post that I just did a bit of cleanup and got stuck wondering what to do next. That made me realize we should make a todo list for next release. I see you already started, but it's incomplete.

More tasks:
-Finish filling out the help text for CivEffects
-change getInt() to the correct ones in help text to get rid of the asserts
-fill out missing tags in CivEffects

What strikes me is that it seems that there is a surprisingly little dll work left. I was drowning in CivEffect dll tasks not long ago and now everything seems to be gone :confused:

-I need to remove finding Mines in treasures, and remove Prospect Levels
We have a game option to turn prospecting on and off. It should be linked to that option. I can look into that problem. I noticed that help text displays prospect levels even when prospecting is turned off. The game option should also control that one.
 
It wasn't meant to be a complete todo list, just stuff I jotted down while playing. Ok, I'll let you look into the prospecting stuff.

At some point I want to do a graphics overhaul of the buttons and such and below I'm posting a possibility. There are other colors but the below has the same brownish color as we have now so we wouldn't have to change everything at once. I have a subscription to Adobe Stock and need to find 10 images every month to download, so if you are feeling froggy take a gander at the stock images and if you see anything useful let me know. We need Images for all the new Professions and Promotions as well.

I'm about done with play testing for a bit.. although I'm itching to hit one more turn :) So, I'll jump back on the Civeffect infos as soon as I can.

 
They look really nice!

The brown and gold go really well together I think, and fit really nicely with the existing theme colour scheme.

It would be cool to use the different shapes and styles for different things and areas of the game GUI.

Make me a list of ten things we need, and I will see if I can find a selection of appropriate images for you to download before the end of the month!
 
They look really nice!

The brown and gold go really well together I think, and fit really nicely with the existing theme colour scheme.

It would be cool to use the different shapes and styles for different things and areas of the game GUI.

Make me a list of ten things we need, and I will see if I can find a selection of appropriate images for you to download before the end of the month!

Yeah, I was wondering about the different shapes as well. Perhaps we can find a use for such things, like for a units commands we could sort the different types by shape, or perhaps things that take several turns could be sorted by one shape, things that are instant by another and stuff like that. When a unit like a worker has a ton of commands that could make it easier to find what you are looking for.

I'll work up a list soon as I can so we all can use it, but for starters we need to finish the Profession Icons. The best images to get are the ones that have multiple icons like the one I posted above, I call them icon sheets, as apposed to a single icon or image. We just need some tool images or weapons that kinda fit what we have now.

I have a couple of other resources I dig through that are free...
http://opengameart.org/
https://openclipart.org/

And there are other sites as well, but those two are the best royalty free ones I've found. You have any suggested sites?

By the way, if you see something you could use in your own works or like TTW let me know. My subscription runs until October next year so I have a bunch to pick out:scan:
 
Ok I will take a look at:

Weapons, Tools, Professions.

I have never really found a good image source before, especially not one that is free.

I have never spent enough time on graphics needs to bother. Everything I made for FTTW was always only meant as a 'make do' concept until I could snare someone proper to do it! :D

I have come so close so many times, but they always get away!!
 
While this isn't directly relate to M:C it is related as M:C is installed on my pc and my pc will not work!! Well, my main user account hangs at Personal Setting (Not Responding) anyway. I have spent hours today trying to decipher what the issue is. Scannow, msconfig, pulling hair out, system restore, safe mode, chkdsk, bang head on wall, pull teeth (was funner), finally, just did the scannow suggestion AGAIN and I am back in my main account... omg.. I can finally stop writing this on my bagillion year old Mac!!! I hate computers!!!

Edit: in case you didn't get that I am finally back on my account, while writing that it finally booted correctly. Now I'm burt out though, ugh.
 
Hey gang, how's it going? :) I have been learning so much and it is crazy that it is only the tip of the iceberg of the development knowledge that is out there. If I can squeeze sometime in for M:C I really feel like I can do some justice to this mod. :) Looking forward to it:beer:
 
Glad you're doing well, have you been studying software development? Also the code base for DoaNE was finally released :) , could be some good stuff there (especially AI and other improvements) if you want to import some code to MC.

P.s. In other news Civ6 still looks like it's gonna be worse than civ4col as far as I can tell! :scan:
 
I wish we could just work on M:C like in the good old days. I still plan to do lots of stuff to that mod. My current status is that I got stuck with a massive xml change due to traits and CivEffects. I then started writing some xml GUI tool. I got as far as reading all xml files and can display the content on the screen and that's more or less how far I got. After that plenty of offline stuff happened and I got away from it all :(

I have a todo list and getting back to M:C is near the top. RaRE fixes and studying DoaNE are also pretty high on the list.

P.s. In other news Civ6 still looks like it's gonna be worse than civ4col as far as I can tell! :scan:
Civ4col appears to be the best civ game engine ever. Vanilla might not be excellent, but with modding it beats all the other engines.
 
Glad you're doing well, have you been studying software development? Also the code base for DoaNE was finally released :) , could be some good stuff there (especially AI and other improvements) if you want to import some code to MC.

P.s. In other news Civ6 still looks like it's gonna be worse than civ4col as far as I can tell! :scan:

Yes, I been teaching myself Unity stuff and also working on an Associates in Programming, finished up my first semester and excited about the next :)

Civ6!!! Has it been that long since Civ5 was out? I need to check that out as this is the first I've heard of it.

I wish we could just work on M:C like in the good old days. I still plan to do lots of stuff to that mod. My current status is that I got stuck with a massive xml change due to traits and CivEffects. I then started writing some xml GUI tool. I got as far as reading all xml files and can display the content on the screen and that's more or less how far I got. After that plenty of offline stuff happened and I got away from it all :(

I have a todo list and getting back to M:C is near the top. RaRE fixes and studying DoaNE are also pretty high on the list.


Civ4col appears to be the best civ game engine ever. Vanilla might not be excellent, but with modding it beats all the other engines.

Yeah, in hind sight I would have attempted to talk you out of that civeffects merge knowing now how big a project it was. I think all we need is to finish up the Pedia and help text stuff right? Lots of leg work there. If we get that done and do some testing I think it's ready for a release version right?

I did like the Civ4 engine and they had it very moddable... not even sure how the other engines turned out in modding terms as I never tried :)
 
I'm not sure it's fair to say that Civ4:Col is best civ game engine around, since it's a col game engine, not civ;)

<Offtopic>
I been teaching myself Unity stuff
If you talking about Unity game engine then I can say the same thing about myself:
My experimental civ game project
I have lots of ideas for a yet another civ-like game clone, but creating complete game is of course lot of work.
</Offtopic>


I really should re-install Civ4:Col again. Freecol is nice light weighted game but it's nothing like some mods for this game.
 
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