Alright I would like to give and update of what I've been up to for the last seven months. The truth is, nothing directly. I got Age of Empires and Age of Empires 2 on a Steam sale at Christmas hoping to mine their graphical assets and ended up playing 1100 hours over the last few months. However, between that and watching a whole bunch of YouTube videos, I've learned a great deal about game design however spotty, and where I would have gone tragically wrong. I definitely suffer from what is called modder’s megalomania. What's more is that my proposed project, Failing Lights 2, is pretty much antithetical to the basic mechanics of civilization 2. It's not that it would be impossible to make that scenario as intended, but I would need to be a master of Lua scripting to even hope to pull it off. Let me explain, if only to show what I've learned.
The first issue is that Civilization 2 is a game about state assent. If you play this game with any kind of competence, your civilization goes from strength to strength. It gets stronger and stronger over time, the only consideration is if the other civilization or civilizations is getting stronger faster than yours. The only way to stop this is to prevent the creation of settler or decent military units like in the Sealion scenario where you only get limited units by research and that's it. Fading lights 2 and the whole rule of the Paleologi Dynasty is about continuous and disastrous decline. That and corruption: lots and lots of corruption. Making the fight against both of those both winnable and challenging throughout the entire campaign without making it a horrible slog his not something a first time creator should be doing. That's not even a question of scripting. Then you get to where the city itself collects all resources meaning that other than pillaging of infrastructure, resource production is never in danger, infrastructure costs nothing but time to rebuild, so it's a lot easier to protect your villagers than in Age of empires where they must be constantly exposed and protected over time. That makes raiding a constant threat than than an annoyance. This is critical for a scenario like Fading Lights and the Turkish Ghazi threat.
The second issue is AI. The AI is absolutely ancient. A I placement is absolutely essential but then you have the basic problems of the AI in the first place which I don't know can be addressed. First the AI needs to pillage a lot more. In my experience the AI makes a beeline for the cities when they need to make every opportunity to pillage all of the infrastructure around, especially the mines and irrigation to cripple the player in the long term. This is what happened two Byzantine Anatolia over the first 20 years of Andronic II’s reign from 1282 until about 1304. It's how the Turks could essentially sit around Prusa and basically every other city in Bithynia for 10-12 years until the city just ran out of food. By the time they marched in in earnest, wherever they weren't their raiding had completely collapsed the economy.
And that brings me to the second issue with the AI. I need some way to make a raider unit that does not attack any unit with an attack value over 1. That way it would only go after civilian units, settlers and any non-attack units that have special Lua scripting and they wouldn't throw themselves at city walls or fortresses in the mountains. then on top of this if I could manage it I would need a script that would make it so units with an attack value of one or less were always the first units to be attacked in a stack which would force players to build more units around civilian collectors so that defending their resource production units would be difficult rather than trivial. The idea would not be to make micromanagement hard but to encourage offensive operations to keep the front lines far away from a central resource collectors.
I don't know how much of this is possible even in abstract. I would like input on this, but frankly I'm going to shelve Fading Lights too because it's outside of the scope of my actual capacities. I'm not giving up however I'm going to start a new project which I'm going to start another thread on when the time comes.
That one is going to be Outremer by the same author. It definitely needs work and it’s needs more love than Fading Lights, and I loved it, and no one else is going to give it the time of day it needs. And of course if it can be ported instead of recreated, it’s already got map and cities placed more or less correctly. I have the file, I’m not going to be asking for port to TOT yet, if it can be done. Instead, if anyone will care to help me, I’m going to do a very, very basic thing and just create a dummy file and translate the events file for Outremer, one event at a time until I have a basic grasp of the structure of very basic Lua. Hopefully then I can start to expand and play with it with minimal help.
So beyond any comments on the theory of using Lua/anything else in the long term to affect the AI’s behavior, is the Lua translation a good place to start practicing fundamentals?
The first issue is that Civilization 2 is a game about state assent. If you play this game with any kind of competence, your civilization goes from strength to strength. It gets stronger and stronger over time, the only consideration is if the other civilization or civilizations is getting stronger faster than yours. The only way to stop this is to prevent the creation of settler or decent military units like in the Sealion scenario where you only get limited units by research and that's it. Fading lights 2 and the whole rule of the Paleologi Dynasty is about continuous and disastrous decline. That and corruption: lots and lots of corruption. Making the fight against both of those both winnable and challenging throughout the entire campaign without making it a horrible slog his not something a first time creator should be doing. That's not even a question of scripting. Then you get to where the city itself collects all resources meaning that other than pillaging of infrastructure, resource production is never in danger, infrastructure costs nothing but time to rebuild, so it's a lot easier to protect your villagers than in Age of empires where they must be constantly exposed and protected over time. That makes raiding a constant threat than than an annoyance. This is critical for a scenario like Fading Lights and the Turkish Ghazi threat.
The second issue is AI. The AI is absolutely ancient. A I placement is absolutely essential but then you have the basic problems of the AI in the first place which I don't know can be addressed. First the AI needs to pillage a lot more. In my experience the AI makes a beeline for the cities when they need to make every opportunity to pillage all of the infrastructure around, especially the mines and irrigation to cripple the player in the long term. This is what happened two Byzantine Anatolia over the first 20 years of Andronic II’s reign from 1282 until about 1304. It's how the Turks could essentially sit around Prusa and basically every other city in Bithynia for 10-12 years until the city just ran out of food. By the time they marched in in earnest, wherever they weren't their raiding had completely collapsed the economy.
And that brings me to the second issue with the AI. I need some way to make a raider unit that does not attack any unit with an attack value over 1. That way it would only go after civilian units, settlers and any non-attack units that have special Lua scripting and they wouldn't throw themselves at city walls or fortresses in the mountains. then on top of this if I could manage it I would need a script that would make it so units with an attack value of one or less were always the first units to be attacked in a stack which would force players to build more units around civilian collectors so that defending their resource production units would be difficult rather than trivial. The idea would not be to make micromanagement hard but to encourage offensive operations to keep the front lines far away from a central resource collectors.
I don't know how much of this is possible even in abstract. I would like input on this, but frankly I'm going to shelve Fading Lights too because it's outside of the scope of my actual capacities. I'm not giving up however I'm going to start a new project which I'm going to start another thread on when the time comes.
That one is going to be Outremer by the same author. It definitely needs work and it’s needs more love than Fading Lights, and I loved it, and no one else is going to give it the time of day it needs. And of course if it can be ported instead of recreated, it’s already got map and cities placed more or less correctly. I have the file, I’m not going to be asking for port to TOT yet, if it can be done. Instead, if anyone will care to help me, I’m going to do a very, very basic thing and just create a dummy file and translate the events file for Outremer, one event at a time until I have a basic grasp of the structure of very basic Lua. Hopefully then I can start to expand and play with it with minimal help.
So beyond any comments on the theory of using Lua/anything else in the long term to affect the AI’s behavior, is the Lua translation a good place to start practicing fundamentals?
Right now, any approach that keeps you interested and gets you actively working in code is great -- you need to gain hands-on experience, and having a concrete project or goal to work towards sounds like a good thing.
