Overlord Scenario Playtest Thread

[CurtSibling]

Going to address your suggestions, which all are valid and useful...!

-I think you should consider disabling incremental rush build. It's extremely powerful for a large empire like Britain.

I am sure ToTPP has a feature to switch of increment buidling...?

-Enhance the U-Boats in the Atlantic - I was never attacked by one in the entire game and have no idea where they all went.

Agreed - I am definitely making new events to randomly spawn some wolf packs.

-I think you might revisit the trade payoff as I was routinely seeing 5,000+ payouts between England and the U.S.

I shall tweak this one, it's perhaps one to tailor for each faction in the seperate scenario I am planning.

-You may wish to tone down British strength a bit and increase German strength in Africa either from the start or via an event when the Brits start advancing.

I will look into this for sure, I agree...But it does make the Axis struggle for African survival fun, maybe less so for new players.

If you'd allow me, I'd say that you have the shell here of what can be a very fun scenario. It certainly has that "one more turn" phenomenon of most of your works. It has all the nice touches that your scenarios typically do, and the balance with art, sound, unit stats, etc. is all there. I just think it's very, very hard to balance a scenario like this with the base game. I know this is probably not feedback everyone is necessarily receptive to, but this would be a great scenario to use the lua template on... You've put an enormous amount of work into building something that is quite fun to play, but a bit easy. Some things that would be relatively easy to achieve with lua:

Thanks for the compliment, sir - From a great designer like yourself, it is a fine praise.

1. canBuild restrictions. You have units like militia which serve no other purpose than being the first thing rush built in incrementation. They ought to be the only units buildable in the far flung reaches of the Empire. Likewise, restricting tanks, aircraft, artillery and ships to cities with factories, and restricting what cities can build those factories, would prevent me from simply rush building along as I go and assembling forces the AI has no hope to counter.

100% want to experiment with this idea! I am excited to implement these. I like your suggestion the elite units, restrict them to certain home cities. If you guide me, I am up to trying this.

2. Initiative. Lua allows one to set events "afterProduction" meaning that they will trigger on a particular tribe's turn. Thus, Barbarossa or other offensives wouldn't immediately stagnate. In my game, the Soviets slaughtered the German invasion, as that invasion began with the Soviets being allowed to move first.

Another essential concept that I am eager to try...Barbaross is a big aspect of this scenario, and I'd love to get it triggering sensibly.

3. You could reduce the MP of the neutral units each turn and cut out much of the wait between turns.

Amazing idea...If this is a doable thing, to restrict/boost the unit movement for a whole faction, it could have great potential...!

Honestly I don't think the scenario would need many more tweaks than this so you could use the events you've already built via the legacyEvents file (maybe moving a select few like Barbarossa to afterProduction in the triggerEvents file), build out an object file and the canBuild files and call it a day. There is a sample for how to do all of this with Boudicca that I would hope would be easy to use. It is achievable, Curt. You can do it and we can help!

Thanks! You have got me on board, and am happy to try out these ideas, sir!

Anyway, I had a very fun time rampaging across Europe so far and may well continue to see how fast I can beat Japan. This is all coming from a good place in an attempt to make a fun scenario even more so

I am delighted at your enthusiasm, and am honoured you'd advise me on how to improve this scenario structure...![/QUOTE]

 

[JPetroski]

Amazing idea...If this is a doable thing, to restrict/boost the unit movement for a whole faction, it could have great potential...!

It's quite easy to achieve. Here's the exact code you'd need (assuming you named your neutral tribe object.tNeutrals in the object file). You'd plug this in the onTurn trigger or I suppose it would also work in the afterProduction trigger.

if turn >= 1 and tribe == object.tNeutrals then -- this is your trigger, so in this case you want it done every turn
    for unit in civ.iterateUnits() do  -- This is where we are looking at ALL units in the game.  The next line will define the SPECIFIC units we want this to apply to
        if unit.owner == object.tNeutrals then -- So we're only looking for units owned by the neutrals (this assumes you've named that tribe tNeutrals in the object file, by the way.
        unit.moveSpent = 255 -- We expend all of their movement points (255 is the most a unit can move, so if we use this, we effectively zero out the MP of the neutrals
        end -- This ends the specifc unit trigger
    end -- This ends the for loop where we searched through all units in the game prior to defining them more narrowly based on their tribal ownership
end -- This ends the event

I am sure ToTPP has a feature to switch of increment buidling...?

Yep - just add this as a line in the COSMIC2 section:

NoIncrementalRushBuy, 1

I will look into this for sure, I agree...But it does make the Axis struggle for African survival fun, maybe less so for new players.

Well, you can do one of two things:

1. Build out player-specific events files manually.
2. Utilize lua for your "branch off" scenarios and use an "isHuman" check. Basically, you can have an event fire only if a certain tribe is or isn't human. So, maybe on turn 1, you check and see if Germany isHuman, and if they aren't, they get a little strength boost in certain areas that the human player would not receive.

Honestly Curt there's not that many designers out there who are active and finish scenarios that aren't currently using lua. We're basically building the template for you and @techumseh so to the extent either of you want help I'm MORE than happy to assist. Also, working with you a little on this would help us understand what is and isn't intuitive both in the template and the designer guide I'm working on (an attempt to take code speak and turn it into something people like you and I would more readily understand - this isn't meant as a jab as I'm in the same boat as you ).

 

[CurtSibling]

You are on the same page as what I am thinking, sir! The core cities are where each civ would get the best units, and gives a high priority to defending these, or capturing them!
I will make up a list today or tomorrow for each civ, and what sort of units are buildable in their "elite unit" cities. Also I 100% want to use the factory improvement as the key to building proper weapons.
Without it, cities can only build militias or workers, etc.

As for the complexity, I was meaning the actual scenario installation, but if Lua is packaged in with the latest ToTPP, I guess that streamlines things to merely activating the patch.

PS
Do you have a DL link to the latest stable ToTPP version?

 

[JPetroski]

Do you have a DL link to the latest stable ToTPP version?

Sure do

And there's no complexity at all to the installation, assuming one has the patch enabled. You just can go down the rabbit hole with making the scenario too complex to play if you're not careful.

 

[Prof. Garfield]

I have been wanting to tackle Lua, but naturally don't have years to develop this scenario, but am willing to explore!
I will have a think about what unit should be built by whom and where. This has to be tackled on a faction by faction basis.
Also I am eager to know what is needed for the average player to implement Lua? Do they need the latest version of ToTPP,
which has the framework to support it - I too am a newb when it comes to making it run.

Over the Reich took years in large part because we were trying to balance a 2 player scenario, although I do admit that one more feature syndrome played its part (and some features did take time to program).

The point of making a template is so that designers don't have to recreate everything from scratch every time. Just fill the data into the appropriate file and off you go. @civ2units 's American War of Independence is probably closest to what you'd want to try first. Mostly old style events, with a few key things done in Lua.

I intend to have the template work such that you rename your legacy events.txt file, extract the template files into your scenario folder, move the legacy events to one of the folders, and have a working scenario. From there, improvements can be made incrementally.

Naturally, I can see clearly the advantages, but at the same time, I don't want to scare people away with a complex
and fiddly system to run the scenario...

Lua can actually make things less intimidating for the player, since it can significantly cut down on house rules. You don't have to worry if you're 'allowed' to build something somewhere, for example. Lua means you can make big complicated scenarios with lots of extra features. It doesn't mean you have to.

If you mean you don't want the installation process to be complicated, that is also getting simpler (as we've learned a little bit more about how to use Lua). It should just be like saving any scenario folder at this point. Half the instructions in OTR refer to installing TOTPP15, rather than the scenario itself. Medieval Millennium is harder to install since it changes stuff like the diplomacy background.

Another essential concept that I am eager to try...Barbaross is a big aspect of this scenario, and I'd love to get it triggering sensibly.

When I release the template, you will be able to trigger Legacy Events from within the Lua code.

Lua Trigger
Allows Lua to trigger events in the Legacy Event Engine directly
usage:
@IF
lua
triggername=myluatrigger
@AND
...

legacy.luaTrigger("myluatrigger","triggerAttackerNameOrNil","triggerDefenderNameOrNil","triggerReceiverNameOrNil")

So you can simple change your Barbarossa trigger conditions in the legacy events, and trigger them in an after production event within the Lua events.

 

[CurtSibling]

@JPetroski
@Prof. Garfield

Guys, you are marvels - I will definitely be installing the new ToTPP, and giving Lua a whirl this week - I appreciate the templates and amazing support...!

 

[CurtSibling]

Installed the latest ToTPP version, and all is working fine. At some time today I am going work on and post a sort of "shopping list" for each civ.

As you chaps advised, it will indicate what cities can build elite units, and what improvements are needed for the various industrial units, etc.
Your suggestions on restricting units to heavily built-up cities has got me excited. It's time to dip my toe into Lua, and then maybe a leg!

 

[civ2units]

I'm now in December 1942.
The Allies have launched operation Overlord while the Soviets conquering the Balkan. In my game too operation Barbarossa seems to be a war without any city seizing but much slaughtering of units on both sides..
In the Pacific the US starts bombing Japans home island while the Japanese tries to defeat me. Until now I was able to fend their attacks with casualties on my side.

The Chinese are harder to play than the Japanese, especially if you have to fight against the Soviets at the same time too, but it's not frustrating. China is a underdog in this scenario and I would say it's the goal to survive as long as possible with them. It was clear that at the beginning of the scenario Japan's troops conquered a couple of cities as they have better units and China is the only enemy in the region. But I have now a chance to liberate the one or other occupied city due to the fact that the US still binding Japans troops in the Pacific. For some reason Japan don't conquer Hong Kong, even if they can.

The Neutral Alliance liberated all cities in Indonesia except Palembang.

 

[civ2units]

Currently Britain is the wealthiest Nation in the World, followed by the USA and Neutral Alliance. Shame on me, I'm on the last place.

 

[CurtSibling]

Nice work, sir!

Seems that tea sales have helped push the UK to the top! I am working on some 2D commissions right now, but I shall have posted some updates and Lua ideas before the week is out.

 

[techumseh]

It's a long thread, so my apologies if you've covered my questions already. 1. Are there separate events for individual civs, or is it a universal events file? 2. What is the appropriate difficulty level?

Overall: The graphics are sumptuous, as we've come to expect from a Curt Sibling scenario. The unit mix is excellent - a full range for each major civ, so all civs are attractive to play. Sounds are excellent as well The tech tree is good, though I had some confusion there. Lots of cities throughout the map, making for interesting play in remote corners of the world. WW2 was not just fought in Europe and the Pacific.

My Game: I'm playing as Germany. I decided to try my hand invading Britain. On the Jan 41 turn, I landed a large force in the square north of London. The next turn, I captured London and landed reinforcements there. I attacked and captured Birmingham, Southampton and Plymouth. Much of the RAF and the Royal Navy was lost attacking Brussels on the second turn. Then I received the surprising news that I had launched Operation Barbarossa! I see that this is because I'd researched 'Total War', which I did just to get the 'factory upgrade' improvement. I'm confident I can capture the remaining 3 cities in Britain in the next 2-3 turns, and then shift to the east.

Suggestions: Cut down on the German transports, especially liners. It makes it too easy for the Germans to invade Britain right off the bat. (And they may not stop there.) Given the high movement factors (quite realistic, given monthly turns) they can sail from a port, disembark their troops and be safely back in port in the same turn. Fighters might be less likely to attack impregnable ground targets if their attack factors were reduced. There's no remedy for the suicidal attacks of naval units, given the programming of the Civ2 AI. Perhaps the Lua people can come up with a solution. A readme file would be very welcome, not the least of which is knowing when your general staff is planning to attack the Soviet Union! Consider specific events files for each civ in single player games.

Nitpicks: The specs for the Pzkw III are identical to the light tank. I assume this is not intended. Ethiopia's capital Addis Ababa is not on the map.

Overall: A fitting sequel to the Dictator series. (You always come up with the best names.) Great scope for the players, allowing sweeping manouevers and creative strategies. Perfect for a multi-player game! I'm looking forward to playing one.

 

[Prof. Garfield]

Suggestions: Cut down on the German transports, especially liners. It makes it too easy for the Germans to invade Britain right off the bat. (And they may not stop there.) Given the high movement factors (quite realistic, given monthly turns) they can sail from a port, disembark their troops and be safely back in port in the same turn. Fighters might be less likely to attack impregnable ground targets if their attack factors were reduced. There's no remedy for the suicidal attacks of naval units, given the programming of the Civ2 AI. Perhaps the Lua people can come up with a solution. A readme file would be very welcome, not the least of which is knowing when your general staff is planning to attack the Soviet Union! Consider specific events files for each civ in single player games.

I don't have an easy remedy for suicidal naval bombardments (but that's not to say there isn't one). Preventing certain amphibious attacks, however, can be done. Here is some code to do it. I haven't tested the code yet (we did something more complicated in OTR), however, so there could be typos or something I've overlooked.

-- the following must be defined in the parameter file
-- param.landingCraftType -- the exempt ship type; 
--                          having more than 1 type means slightly more
--                          complicated code
-- param.maxShipUnloadMove -- the maximum movement expenditure on the
--                          for a ship to be allowed to unload
--  make sure to require text and parameter modules
local function amphibiousCheck(unit)
    -- check if unit owned by a human, a land unit, at sea,
    -- and has a valid carriedBy entry.  If any of these are
    -- not true, return without doing anything.
    if (not unit.owner.isHuman) or (unit.type.domain ~= 0) or
        (unit.location.terrainType % 16 ~=10) or
        not (unit.carriedBy and unit.carriedBy.type.domain == 2) then
        return
    end
    local ship = unit.carriedBy
    -- if ship carrying the unit hasn't spent much movement, or is the landing craft type, then do nothing
    if (ship.moveSpent <= totpp.movementMultipliers.aggregate*param.maxShipUnloadMove) or ship.type == param.landingCraftType then
        return
    else
        -- if the ship can't unload, display a message, and expend the land
        -- unit's movement points for the turn.
        text.simple(text.substitute("Our %STRING1 has already expended %STRING2 movement points this turn.  All ships other than %STRING3 can unload units only if they have moved fewer than %STRING4 tiles on the current turn.  Our %STRING5 has had its movement points expended and must wait until next turn to disembark.",{ship.type.name,ship.moveSpent//totpp.movementMultipliers.aggregate,param.landingCraftType.name,param.maxShipUnloadMove,unit.type.name}),"Game Concepts: Amphibious Landings")
        unit.moveSpent = 255
        return
    end
end

In the unitActivation event, you would include the line

amphibiousCheck(unit)

In Game.txt, you disable the option to unload units when sailing a ship into the coast, meaning that a unit must be selected to make a landing, and the unit activation code will run.

This code checks if the ship carrying the land unit has moved at most a certain number of spaces, and, if it has, spends all the land unit's movement points so that the unit can't unload this turn. This means that ships must expose themselves near the coast they intend to attack. The code also offers an exemption for a special landing craft unit.

 

[JPetroski]

One complicated way to address suicide bombardment might be an onActivation check for AI warships that references relative enemy strength in the next tiles over and then swaps in the "submarine" flag depending on certain parameters.

 

[civ2units]

It's May 1943 and I had the chance to liberate Changteh and Kwangchowan. Unfortunatelly the Japanese Navy destroyed my whole garrison in Kwangchowan after I liberated the city.
Of course Stalin attacked me again and I'm now again at war with two enemies.

One thing I noticed in this gameplay. The AI, except the Soviets and Neutrals don't conquering enemy cities. Japan for example always destroys the garrison in Hong Kong but doesn't conquer the city.
The Allies started Operation Overlord but didn't conquer any city from the Germans until now. Only the Soviets are conquering one city after another in Europe.
My fears will became true again, Europe changes into a socialist superstate under Soviet rule.

I'm not sure but could it be because of the gouvernments of the Allies? I assume that the Allied gouvernments are democratic. In the vanilla game the democratic gouvernments are more pacifistic than the others. Maybe that's the reason why the AI doesn't conquer cities. I know that in the cheat menu you can change parameters on the register "Special Rules". There is a "Special WWII-only AI" parameter available. Does anyone knows what this parameter does, how it works?

 

[CurtSibling]

It's a long thread, so my apologies if you've covered my questions already. 1. Are there separate events for individual civs, or is it a universal events file? 2. What is the appropriate difficulty level?

Overall: The graphics are sumptuous, as we've come to expect from a Curt Sibling scenario. The unit mix is excellent - a full range for each major civ, so all civs are attractive to play. Sounds are excellent as well The tech tree is good, though I had some confusion there. Lots of cities throughout the map, making for interesting play in remote corners of the world. WW2 was not just fought in Europe and the Pacific.

My Game: I'm playing as Germany. I decided to try my hand invading Britain. On the Jan 41 turn, I landed a large force in the square north of London. The next turn, I captured London and landed reinforcements there. I attacked and captured Birmingham, Southampton and Plymouth. Much of the RAF and the Royal Navy was lost attacking Brussels on the second turn. Then I received the surprising news that I had launched Operation Barbarossa! I see that this is because I'd researched 'Total War', which I did just to get the 'factory upgrade' improvement. I'm confident I can capture the remaining 3 cities in Britain in the next 2-3 turns, and then shift to the east.

Suggestions: Cut down on the German transports, especially liners. It makes it too easy for the Germans to invade Britain right off the bat. (And they may not stop there.) Given the high movement factors (quite realistic, given monthly turns) they can sail from a port, disembark their troops and be safely back in port in the same turn. Fighters might be less likely to attack impregnable ground targets if their attack factors were reduced. There's no remedy for the suicidal attacks of naval units, given the programming of the Civ2 AI. Perhaps the Lua people can come up with a solution. A readme file would be very welcome, not the least of which is knowing when your general staff is planning to attack the Soviet Union! Consider specific events files for each civ in single player games.

Nitpicks: The specs for the Pzkw III are identical to the light tank. I assume this is not intended. Ethiopia's capital Addis Ababa is not on the map.

Overall: A fitting sequel to the Dictator series. (You always come up with the best names.) Great scope for the players, allowing sweeping manouevers and creative strategies. Perfect for a multi-player game! I'm looking forward to playing one.

Cheers, Tech!
I am taking note of all feedback here, and as mentioned in earlier posts, this scenario is a sort of MP testbed exercise.
Going to (hopefully) use Lua to try and cut out some game-engine problems (like battleships rush built on distant islands)
I do plan complete tailored versions of Overlord scenario for each civ, and will build those from the version that rises from this thread.

Thanks for the feedback, and I am fully planning on tackling each of these things in turn...

Now try and invade the USA when they get atom bombs, and tell me how it goes!

 

[CurtSibling]

It's May 1943 and I had the chance to liberate Changteh and Kwangchowan. Unfortunatelly the Japanese Navy destroyed my whole garrison in Kwangchowan after I liberated the city.
Of course Stalin attacked me again and I'm now again at war with two enemies.

One thing I noticed in this gameplay. The AI, except the Soviets and Neutrals don't conquering enemy cities. Japan for example always destroys the garrison in Hong Kong but doesn't conquer the city.
The Allies started Operation Overlord but didn't conquer any city from the Germans until now. Only the Soviets are conquering one city after another in Europe.
My fears will became true again, Europe changes into a socialist superstate under Soviet rule.

I'm not sure but could it be because of the gouvernments of the Allies? I assume that the Allied gouvernments are democratic. In the vanilla game the democratic gouvernments are more pacifistic than the others. Maybe that's the reason why the AI doesn't conquer cities. I know that in the cheat menu you can change parameters on the register "Special Rules". There is a "Special WWII-only AI" parameter available. Does anyone knows what this parameter does, how it works?

The UK is monarchy, and the USA is a republic, both showing a severe lack of pacificism in my playthroughs...
I do notice Japan stops heavily garrisoning cities at certain points...I think it might be due to them mass building ships?

 

[civ2units]

Maybe Japan builds a lot of naval units because their capital is on an island? Except of parts of China Japan don't own many countryside cities. Nearly every city has a harbor.

In my first game with Japan the Allies wheren't that pacifistic. At the end of the game, Europe was devided into west and east.

 

[CurtSibling]

Using ToTPP 15.1 -
Was tweaking unit stats and was taking a turn to test, and noticed CIV2 is now crashing when I select "G" for the goto menu.

Not sure what is causing this.
There are 2500+ units, and 200+ cities in the save, well within the limits.
A backup test save (which is turn on one) works fine, and the menu is OK.
The crash still happens with older versions of ToTPP.

I assume there must be parameters in the save that breaks some ToTPP limit.
Not sure what...I include the save and rules in case someone can see something I am missing.
As I said, I was messing with the stats for the armor units, but I can see no missed comma or other crazy bug?

Opinions?

 

[CurtSibling]

Wasn't able to discover what was up with that save - I have however found the crash didn't happen when I hit cheat mode and F3-ed into another civ.
So perhaps it was something to do with the tweaked unit values, and caused a situation that ToTPP didn't like. I have deleted the save, and went ahead
with some edits to the setup and map as suggested by Tech.

I have changed the city of Ankober (a relic of the Imperialism map) to Addis Ababa, which makes more historical sense.
I removed the three ocean liners from Germany's roster. If you want to invade the UK, you must invest in these big vessels now.
I have edited the COSMIC2 settings to nix any exploits using the incremental build feature. I also added the surplus resource carry-over.
Tweaked the units yet again, and am hoping the AIs will make use of their full roster and churn out a good mix of infantry/tank units for defence/attack.

@JPetroski
Next up, I am going to post my short list of Lua proposals for the scenario, incorporating your suggestions for unit restrictions based on city infrastructure.
Also if you are up for it, the list of cities and what unit "specials" can be build there...Looking forward to making the play more interesting with these features.

 

[JPetroski]

Next up, I am going to post my short list of Lua proposals for the scenario, incorporating your suggestions for unit restrictions based on city infrastructure.
Also if you are up for it, the list of cities and what unit "specials" can be build there...Looking forward to making the play more interesting with these features.

I'd go check out the template thread and download it and also just open some of the files in Boudicca as well. Pay attention to the canBuildSettings in the luaRulesEvents folder as well as the objects file in the luaParameterFiles folder. These should get you started and I can help out if something is confusing!