[MOD] Medieval: Conquests

[mastrude]

I have what you may think is very good news.

I'm a retired software system architect. For example I designed a logical network of over 2,000 computers, 200 printers, etc.

I'm a fairly punk Civ player, despite having spent thousands of hours playing it badly. I'm not satisfied with my games, so yesterday I went through the frustration and humiliation of getting taught by a player who's much much better than I am. I learned a lot and I want to learn more.

So the way to learn more is by studying the game in precise detail, and one (less boring) way to do that is to document things. I'm volunteering to write XML for this mod. How can I join your team?

 

[mastrude]

Don't get burned out on the mod just yet I'll need you to test the newest update I been working with the AI still getting the game where they can actually play it, it's getting closer.

OK. Here are a number of random problems I have noticed. I suggest you read and then forget these so we can see whether they still exist after the update. If you are like me, then reading these, you might very well slap yourself on the head and say "Oh, yeah! I know how to fix that!"

- Some transports won't let you load luxury food. (I forget which ones. I'll test and let you know.

- To start building a Bailey, you need 100 lumber on the spot. Now here's the thing:
- If you have 200 lumber in a cart, the Bailey won't build
- The process takes the 100 lumber out of the cart. If you then move the empty cart elsewhere, the lumber gets lost and you have to provide another 100 to finish.

- You can't build an inventor's workshop in a Bailey? Why not? What if you build a palace there? The Bailey is one natural seat for your conqueror, right?

One of the advantages of being a smart but bad player is that you sometimes realize what you don't know. I don't understand the role of fealty. I imagine it helps you attract converts and win battles. It also causes the Pope to add lots of troops. So I think the way to win is to avoid building fealty until late game, to overwhelm the Pope's ability to respond, "Get inside his decision cycle," as Gen. Schwarzkopf said, producing "shock and awe" which your electronic enemy has no brain cells to register. How do you guys handle this when you play the mod?

By the way, I also think the privateer mod and the vanilla game need a little more than 300 turns. Or at least I would prefer them that way.

 

[Nightinggale]

How can I join your team?

Inform me once you figure out how to do that. I have tried that myself and failed

 

[mastrude]

Inform me once you figure out how to do that. I have tried that myself and failed

From our talk, I thought you already were on his team. That's why I volunteered. He hasn't accepted my help, in the past.

Well, Kailric will let us know. Or, alternatively, he won't.

 

[Nightinggale]

From our talk, I thought you already were on his team. That's why I volunteered. He hasn't accepted my help, in the past.

Well, Kailric will let us know. Or, alternatively, he won't.

I didn't have much luck joining existing mod development teams so I made my own. You are welcome to join that one if you like. Still it shouldn't be seen as a replacement for Medieval conquest. Ideally I would like to work on both as the majority of what I have done so far would fit both, specially the codechange to make the game faster and reduce memory usage without affecting gameplay.

If Kailric wants to be king of the hill with his mod, then that's his choice
However I think the difficulty in joining Medieval conquest isn't based on a "it's mine" policy. It's more like a "I don't have the time right now" policy.

I wonder about one thing. Is there any particular reason why Journeyman MODCOMP isn't used?

Yes, there is a very good and logical reason... you haven't merged it yet Seriously though, I have had to do most of the coding and merging code myself and all that just takes time. What I am wanting to do here is get the basic core game setup the way I have it envisioned and then when that's done, bug free, and is a fun game, I can start to merge in the extra features like the Journeyman mod. I actually created the Journeyman mod with my Medieval mod in mind and its on the todo list to merge it in. If you wanted to do that I could send you my latest relevant SDK files and then my next version I upload will have the Journeyman mod.

This is a clear sign that Kailric is open for other people coding. I just wish it would be through some version control (like svn/git) as sending files around like that always ends up in a mess.

For the record I started looking at the Journeyman mod. It may end up in RaRE and then it would be a diff, which is easily movable to Medieval conquest. I think I will make some code modifications though (mostly coding design changes and little or no gameplay changes), which I need to sort out first.

 

[mastrude]

This game, like other builder games, goes better with a database you can reference. I just wrote a scratchpad database in Access that will let you keep track of what people and materials are needed where.

I'd like to use the large pictures of professions and materials that appear in the Civilopaedia. Can anyone tell me whether these are in a decodable form? Where they are?

 

[Nightinggale]

This game, like other builder games, goes better with a database you can reference. I just wrote a scratchpad database in Access that will let you keep track of what people and materials are needed where.

I'd like to use the large pictures of professions and materials that appear in the Civilopaedia. Can anyone tell me whether these are in a decodable form? Where they are?

Try Assets/XML/Art/CIV4ArtDefines_Unit.xml

Also Try to look in RaR or RaRE. I changed Pedia pages for yields to tell them which units provides a bonus for the yield in question. This is one of the things I would like to add here as well. It's nice to go "I lack yield X" and then look up X in pedia to see which units provides a bonus. Remember that some exports provides +100% in their main field and +50% for similar fields. Now that I think about it, it's a 100% python change. I can add it here without access to the newest DLL source. Maybe I should try to do that.

 

[Nightinggale]

That turned out to be easy. It was just copy-paste one block where I commented start and end of it. The yield pedia now show unit modifiers as well (see screenshot).

Place the .py file in Assets\Python\Screens

This should make it easier to get familiar with the new units.

This game, like other builder games, goes better with a database you can reference. I just wrote a scratchpad database in Access that will let you keep track of what people and materials are needed where.

I'm thinking the same thing, except I wonder how I can place it in the domestic advisor. Feel free to go to RaRE and post your thoughts on what it should be able to do. Once it's part of RaRE it can join the queue of features which would be nice to move to Medieval Conquest.

 

[mastrude]

When I have images I will make my scratchpad available to others. This may take a while. Maybe I'd even fancy it up with a look to go with the medieval mod. Putting it inside the game isn't something I'd thought of, but it may be practical.

 

[mastrude]

Nightinggale, you could collaborate with me on my data base. Having a scratchpad application is just for starters. One could, given enough work, create a model of your whole civ and provide expert assistance.

EDIT: Do you think that Access could read stocks of materials in towns from the game database? Do you have any idea how? Of course it would be great to read the buildings there and professions there as well.

 

[mastrude]

Hm... I have a master butcher in a butcher's house, 100 sheep and 36 salt in the warehouse, but he's not producing luxury food. Am I missing something? Butcher's only process cattle? The popup says so.

 

[Nightinggale]

Nightinggale, you could collaborate with me on my data base. Having a scratchpad application is just for starters. You could, given enough work, create a model of your whole civ and provide expert assistance.

EDIT: Do you think that Access could read stocks of materials in towns from the game database? Do you have any idea how? Of course it would be great to read the buildings there and professions there as well.

I think it would be a lot of work to get ingame data out of the game, which is the whole point of my idea to make something inside the game. The problem would be that making something ingame has the opposite problem. It has the ingame data, but no obvious way of displaying it. I haven't figured out precisely how I want to do that or even precisely what I want to display. It's something, which is on my todo list, but not on the top.

Hm... I have a master butcher in a butcher's house, 100 sheep and 36 salt in the warehouse, but he's not producing luxury food. Am I missing something? Butcher's only process cattle? The popup says so.

As I wrote in the RaRE thread I just lost Windows , which means I can't check. However if I remember correctly you need cattle. Check the pedia page. The pedia pages are great in the sense that they don't contain text as such. Instead they are generated on the fly based on game data. If there is a bug in the game, the bug will appear in Pedia too. They can't desync.

 

[mastrude]

The pedia pages are great in the sense that they don't contain text as such. Instead they are generated on the fly based on game data. If there is a bug in the game, the bug will appear in Pedia too. They can't desync.

I think I understand. The same 3D art .NIF file used to show, for example, a ship in the game is read by the Pedia pages and used to generate a flat image. That being so, the easiest way to capture these images (though tedious) is to crop them form screenshots of the pedia, then Photoshop them.

I've always highly respected the system design of Civ IV, and I'm not getting any less impressed.

 

[orlanth]

Originally Posted by mastrude View Post
By the way, what's a good freeware XML editor? I have Microsoft Infopath, but it expects the schema in a different filetype and doesn't like Civ's schemas.

I really like XML marker (symbolclick.com). It allows a table view where you can conveniently view and edit stats of buildings/units etc in table form - a huge time and error saver.

 

[Kailric]

Hm... I have a master butcher in a butcher's house, 100 sheep and 36 salt in the warehouse, but he's not producing luxury food. Am I missing something? Butcher's only process cattle? The popup says so.

Hey, guys, sorry just now seeing these posts. Anyone is welcome to join the team here and basically you guys are already a part of it. You have both given good suggestions which I have added to the game. mastrude, you are more than welcome to work on the XML, which part are you referring too, like the descriptions? And, Nightinggale, I am very interested in your ideas on how to improve game performance. I have added tons to this game and you can feel the system hit when you play the mod vs the vanilla game.

In the current version there is no code so that professions can use "either or" goods to produce a product, it want do say, Cattle "or" Sheep plus Salt. So, it is set up so that Butchers use only Cattle and Salt. Sheep then become of little value besides selling them or useing them to create sheep farms.

In the new version however, I have removed salt as a commodity. Now Butchers require Cattle and Spices to make Luxury Food and Inns use Sheep (think mutton) and Wine to build Culture. Now sheep have a better purpose.

Thanks for the bug report on building Baileys. From what people have told me that's one feature of the game that didn't really get used so I haven't put any more time into it and have considered removing it all together. What do you think about it, is it a fun part of the game?

My over all goal here is to have a fun Medieval simulation based on the original Colonization game. We have played with the idea of having specialized cities, that being; commerce, religious, and military, because it seemed like a good "fun" idea However, in my studies cities could be built up around military forts but then some cities built military defenses up around them as they grew. Also, monasteries could start out with just the monks, but the monks become so prosperous in their endeavors that whole cities grew up around them. So, I've been thinking of removing city type requirements altogether and just let the different cities have different starting buildings. This would take some time to code cause right now buildings like Shrines and Markets share the same Special building slot on the city screen and would over lap each other, so I may do this in a future update.

Fealty is what use to be Bells in the vanilla game and it represents the peoples approval of your kingship, meaning that percent of the cities population supports you as their king. And yeah, it will increase the Pope's army. This was a gripe people had in the vanilla game and a strategy as you say was to wait till late game to build up your Rebel sentiment.

My idea to fix this is by using the Pope's attitude towards you as a more influence on his decision making. If he is upset with you he will check your "power", if it is pretty strong then he will add units to his army.

Also, in this Mod, Fealty directly influences Immigration. At the start of your game if you put a steward to work it will increase Immigration. In the Vanilla game only Cross production increased Immigration but in this mod it is a factor of Fealty, Religion, and Culture.

That's a big reply so I'll stop here for now

 

[Kailric]

I'd like to use the large pictures of professions and materials that appear in the Civilopaedia. Can anyone tell me whether these are in a decodable form? Where they are?

Are you refearing to the 3D images or the flat icons?

The professions Icons are located in the vanilla Art/Interface/Buttons/Civilizations/Colonization_Civilizations_Leaders.dds file.

Its not in my mod yet. One of the things on the todo list is to add new Professions Icons for all the new professions. Anyway, you can create individual icons of professions, units, whatever so you don't have to actually edit the Colonization_Civilizations_Leaders.dds file. They just need to be the right size, like 61x61.

 

[Nightinggale]

And, Nightinggale, I am very interested in your ideas on how to improve game performance. I have added tons to this game and you can feel the system hit when you play the mod vs the vanilla game.

While it will help to add the improvements I already made (which aren't that great btw). it does sound like I need to take a closer look at how you unknowingly decided to waste CPU cycles. I will also take a look for network desync causing code once I look around (never tried Medieval Conquest in MP, but I plan to).

 

[orlanth]

My idea to fix this is by using the Pope's attitude towards you as a more influence on his decision making. If he is upset with you he will check your "power", if it is pretty strong then he will add units to his army.

Yes, that sounds like a great idea. A main problem with the vanilla King is that it's essentially random when/if he demands a special payment, and it doesn't matter particularly much whether his attitude is Pleased or Furious.

 

[Kailric]

While it will help to add the improvements I already made (which aren't that great btw). it does sound like I need to take a closer look at how you unknowingly decided to waste CPU cycles. I will also take a look for network desync causing code once I look around (never tried Medieval Conquest in MP, but I plan to).

Yeah, the Mod does desync while in MP. I didn't even consider that while modding. And some of my code I just through together petty quick at times just to test out new features and such so it could probably use some fine tuning. I know I keep saying I am almost ready for the next upload, but I am I have a few more adjustments to make so hopefully one day this week I'll have it done. I'll be sure to upload the source code this time as well.

 

[mastrude]

I think there should be an option not to build anything in a settlement. Otherwise you wind up being forced to build things you don't want to. You can bypass this for one turn by trying to build something you don't have materials for, but this is a pain in that the only lasts for one turn and then has to be repeated. Maybe the labor lost could be converted to culture.