[TOT] The Day After: Redux

[Thorvald of Lym]

"The Day After" is a scenario by Dorian Credé for Fantastic Worlds that I first discovered through @Blake00's archiving efforts here. Essentially an advanced vanilla start with a post-apocalyptic flair, it was basically playable except for one key oversight: the horrendous level of on-map pollution that would trigger global warming multiple times before you had a hope of cleaning it up. Whether this was a bait-and-switch by design or an oversight due to lack of playtesting, the result is the same: a swampy nightmare barely 100 turns into the game that makes it decidedly not fun.

My original impetus for the MGE ports was to transcribe it into ToT and use the extra terrain provided by TOTPP to preserve the immediate challenge of contamination without it destroying the map. (For comparison, After the Apocalypse begins with 21 polluted tiles, enough to trigger a drought in the first few turns if not immediately cleaned up; The Day After has over 50 just in Europe alone!)

I've now got the game loading properly, but as I've dug deeper into the scenario itself, I'm thinking what started as a cosmetic update will instead be a full remaster: balance between civs is random (the Europeans start with 19 cities and no units, India a mere 3; the US retains bases in Korea and Japan; Russia retains contiguous control of virtually all its prewar territory, &c.), barbarian strongholds can be easily bribed for effectively invincible early-game armies; and the original MicroProse world map is decidedly outdated compared to what modders have produced since. There are also some weird choices, like starting with the world blacked out so cities immediately starve on the first turn.

I'm basically thinking of rebuilding everything from scratch, as a sort of global-scope American Kingdoms. Now that I can finally use the legacy tools on my post-Vista rigs, I actually have a shot at crafting a "proper" scenario, and making a public thread to track progress will hopefully help me keep on task.

 

[Blake00]

ooooh.. I'll be keeping an eye on this.

Any interesting plans for the world terrain graphics? For those that go check out the original MGE scenario you'll see me mention that the original actually had zero custom terrain so I just did a quick & dirty job on it and put my 'dark apocalypse' terrain I created for the Terminator mod remaster into it to up the atmosphere as I thought my terminator terrain would go well with the 100% dark world map fog The Day After uses ie you finally start clearing the fog only to find more eerie darkness heh. No doubt something better could be done by you or someone for a ToT version.

 

[Thorvald of Lym]

I'd actually started drafting an original post-apocalyptic scenario some years back mixing Catfish's 24-bit collection with elements from ToT terrains (which spurred my delve into Freeciv modding as this was before TOTPP increased usable terrain), so I had a working blueprint going in. I'm still playing around with what looks good (and can be distinguished on the minimap), but I think I've got a good base:

I think I'll do this in two stages: Patch up the original scenario mostly as-is to show off my reskins (including renamed governments and the civs reconceptualized as regions rather than nation-states), and then rebuild it on a new map with better balancing.

 

[Dadais]

Cool indeed

Wondering when the Global warning terraforming is occuring,

Would

At the end of 7th player turn,
Storing pollution locations
Removing pollutions

At the beginning of 0th player turn,
Restoring pollutions
Erasing pollution location storage

Allow to avoid the undesired terraform effect ?

 

[Thorvald of Lym]

...That is a definite possibility. An unsourced error that never loaded events properly for my own scenarios has handicapped my experience with Lua, but assuming the code exists, I could certainly try it as a workaround.

 

[Blake00]

I'd actually started drafting an original post-apocalyptic scenario some years back mixing Catfish's 24-bit collection with elements from ToT terrains (which spurred my delve into Freeciv modding as this was before TOTPP increased usable terrain), so I had a working blueprint going in. I'm still playing around with what looks good (and can be distinguished on the minimap), but I think I've got a good base:

View attachment 659273

I think I'll do this in two stages: Patch up the original scenario mostly as-is to show off my reskins (including renamed governments and the civs reconceptualized as regions rather than nation-states), and then rebuild it on a new map with better balancing.

Ooooh nice.. this day time apocalypse set would probably go well with the old Mad Max scenario I found too. Once again that had nothing too so I did a quick & dirty day time apocalypse terrain set for it as it was a cool idea that deserved better than the default Civ2 MGE graphics lol.

I just noticed your dark water.. is that from Catfish's set too? I've got his 24bit collection somewhere so I might dig that coast & water out and use it in the future eg might go well with my Command & Conquer Tiberian Sun universe apocalyptic scenario either in a future ToT version or back converted into the current MGE one.
.

 

[Thorvald of Lym]

I just noticed your dark water.. is that from Catfish's set too?

Aye. I'm waffling whether to edit the coast to blend better with the land, or switch to a bluer set with sandy shore.

 

[Blake00]

Aye. I'm waffling whether to edit the coast to blend better with the land, or switch to a bluer set with sandy shore.

heh yeah I noticed that but didn't wanna be a negative nancy lol. That's why I'm eyeing it off for my night time dark scenario as it'll go well with that.

 

[Thorvald of Lym]

So my experiments into manhandling pollution have raised more questions than answers. I put together a script to suss out the variables per turn, and from what I've determined they work thus:

civ.game.globalWarming — The stage of global warming, eg. how many times ice caps have melted (Byte 691 in Catfish's guide).​

civ.game.globalWarmingCycle — Progress to the next global warming stage. Increments by 1/turn (plus or minus) for each polluted tile on the map, to a maximum of 2 per tile (eg. 12 tiles = 24 ceiling). Triggers warning popup at 12, and warming at 17 (so the maximum 'safe' level of on-map pollution is 8). Resets on new stage. Byte 690.​

civ.game.pollution — Total polluted tiles. Contrary to the description in RULES.TXT, the score modifier is universal, and not based on which civ controls polluted tiles. Bytes 694–5.​

civ.game.pollutionNearCities — Unclear; this does not actually change regardless if city squares are polluted.​

(Interestingly, MGE registers pollution score changes through the Cheat menu immediately, whereas ToT only computes them at the end of the turn.)

The scenario's behaviour is not what I expected: on the first turn all values are 0, on the second pollutionNearCities jumps to 12, then falls back to 0 on Turn 3 and stays so on all following turns. This seems to be an effect of the conversion process, as the APOCALYP port suffers the same problem, sans the pollutionNearCities spike. Since the game isn't registering existing pollution, cleaning the tiles creates a negative value, awarding a score bonus! (Subsequent pollution is handled correctly.)

(Aside: Testing against the MGE version revealed a bug in the original scenario: pollution score is positive and does not match the # of polluted tiles.)

It seems these variables cannot be manipulated directly: trying 'civ.game.pollution = 0' logs an error in the Lua console that the key cannot be written. I also tried hex editing the bytes, but the values revert on the next turn, so something else is writing to them. I don't know if I'm missing further documentation, but it looks like I'll have to rebuild the map from scratch just to fix this.


A separate bug, which I have never seen before, is a partial override of the sixth tribe ID. Dong Ya (Chinese) are the sixth civ (English in the original scenario); the garrison flag is correct, yet their shield/text colour is white and the diplomacy screen uses Caesar's portrait.

Rules.txt did not modify the tribe masks so I am at a complete loss as to what's causing this, or how to fix it. None of the other civs are affected.