The Hall of Unfinished Works

[JPetroski]

So in the Caesar playtest, an old situation that has apparently annoyed designers for years came up: the AI was building units that they should not be able to. It seems that years ago, this could be potentially game breaking. Now, lua allows a quick fix that instantly deletes the units the AI shouldn't have each turn.

This got me thinking... I wonder if there are scenarios out there that ran into issues like this late in the development stage. How many "unfinished works" are unfinished because the designer became irritated with some bug they couldn't overcome, or a problem they couldn't fix?

I was thinking we might share our stories here to see if lua can be the reason these works finally see the light...

OVER THE REICH
I spent a ridiculous amount of time on it. I really think it has potential, but it's a beast to play because there's just sooo much to do and you almost have to play it with a notebook because you're swapping between several civs, each controlling certain units (the Luftwaffe doesn't control the radar so you have to keep track of what the radar found independently).

-With lua, I can reduce everything to two-three civs from 7.
-I can eliminate the annoying need to go through EVERY radar every turn and look for something and turn radar installations into 'k' units that shoot radar when you need it
-Same with flak guns.
-With lua, I can restrict what units can be built in what cities, so I can make it that only airfields build air units and only cities build ground units, etc. so no need to have several civs. I could also have only certain airfields build USAAF forces vs. RAF forces, etc.

Basically, I can cut 60-80% of the busy work out of the scenario and make it more fun to play.

What scenarios do you have lying out there that we should be seeing? Post them here and let's brainstorm and see if lua is what can save them!

 

[McMonkey]

Lua can turn Over the Reich from an innovative but tedious to administer scenario into a fantastic multiplayer head to head duel. I really loved the concept, but the mechanics were so clunky that it took a lot of the focus away from the interesting aspects of the scenario (bombers & fighters) and forced the player to spend most of their time running infrastructure and managing radar stations. Being able to only call on flak and radar when you feel the need will revolutionise this scenario.

The one project that I spent huge amounts of time on, but ultimately got frustrated with the bugs was Aeterna Civitas III Test of Time. The more I tried to fix things, the more it seemed to break. One of these days I would love to go back and fix that up.

 

[JPetroski]

It's not even just the radar and flak (which were a giant pain)... With 'k' units there is no more need to have situations where you automatically know 8-9 bombers have to die just attacking the target, much less getting to it. Bombers can simply carry bombs. Fighters can carry bullets. Instead of having to move and assemble hundreds of aircraft every turn (which was also a huge pain) You could assemble a few dozen. 12-15 bombers out to strike one thing and another 3-6 after another. Each escorted by 3-4 fighters. With the ammo concept, none of them necessarily "have" to die in any attack. Bombers could limp home. Fighters could pick up stragglers.

The concept of speed could also be revolutionized... Slow aircraft could have most or all of their attacks eaten up by pressing k and arming ammo. Faster units might be able to shoot and scoot. Air combat as we know it would change completely.

Industry too could be revolutionized. Take away the need to micromange it and instead have dialogue boxes pop up after techs are discovered, each with choices that with one click of a button positions unit that used to have to be laboriously moved by hand. The "zones" we're utilizing in Caesar and Philip could be used to check how many industrial targets are alive, and give a cash (or other) bonus each turn that this is true... If 10 or more factories exist, player gets 1000 gold. If 5 or more, 500, etc.

Pretty much every boring task could be moved to the background so all the player would need to focus on would be where to attack, when and how.

So as for Aeterna... What were the bugs? How can we fix them? When can we play this?

 

[McMonkey]

The sky's the limit! If you'll pardon the pun.

I have no plans to work on Aeterna Civitas right now, but I did spend a lot of time on this scenario and would like to bring it up to date at some point. If I recall correctly the bugs were with the Legion recruitment system. Basically, you built a very expensive 'Legion' unit, which then destroyed itself against a Barbarian unit (static and invincible) which then event generated an entire Legion. I can't remember the exact issues, but I know things were breaking down and I believe there were other bugs. I run out of steam and haven't been able to work up the enthusiasm to go back and fix it since.

 

[McMonkey]

Hopefully Lua will hold the key to solving the issues with Techumseh's Burma campaign? I really enjoyed my playtest and think it would be a great scenario if the technical issues could be overcome.

 

[Patine]

I pretty much have four projects with a noticeable and significant start, but definitely unfinished, and two of them are VERY old (actually first started before I first started my Korean War scenario), and many new features could easily improve them, and the third was shelved altogether several years and the fourth was put on hiatus last year originally because both of the latter seemed undoable, but Lua and other new features could very easily change that. These four are:
-Empire of the Rising Sun - The WW2 Pacific Theatre meant to be played as Japan
-Modern Middle East - A scenario meant to cover Middle-Eastern wars and other affairs between 1990 and 2020 that had already started to get overwrought in the events and number of units (Lua and new ToTPP improvements could easily help there)
-War of the Spanish Succession - A scenario that had a good start several years ago, but fizzed out because the game engine seemed inadequate to handle my plans (new developments could change that)
-Fall of Rome - My most recently unveiled project, went onto hiatus (and could easily be revived) for much the same reasons as the Seven Years' War above

Edited the actual war in question for the third unfinished scenario, which was originally entered in error

 

[CurtSibling]

One day, Patine - You will complete a scenario!

 

[Patine]

One day, Patine - You will complete a scenario!

I have completed one. The Korean War scenario was functionally complete on my release. @McMonkey just asked to embellish it, spruce it up, and expand it. But it was a complete scenario, nonetheless, at the time.

 

[JPetroski]

He kids - we all know it isn't easy!!! But for what it is worth, all four of those projects seem very interesting and if there is any particular issue holding you back, I'd be happy to help brainstorm how to overcome it!

 

[JPetroski]

Hopefully Lua will hold the key to solving the issues with Techumseh's Burma campaign? I really enjoyed my playtest and think it would be a great scenario if the technical issues could be overcome.

Yes, I was thinking of @techumseh and Burma when I created this thread. Hopefully that scenario becomes his first foray into lua!

 

[techumseh]

Thank you for those thoughts, gentlemen. I'm looking forward to see what comes from your experiments with Lua. Once some basic events are established, I hope to incorporate them. I've always been a bit of a late adopter, I'm afraid.

The problem with Burma wasn't the limitations of existing event language, however. I even found a workable solution to my hump problem (don't take that the wrong way ). It was that somehow the wrong events got imbeded in the scenario file, and I couldn't change them. Reinforcements that were scheduled to appear on turn 7 kept showing up on turn 3. Other events stopped working as well. It didn't matter what the events text was changed to, the issue persisted. I tried lots of things, including using the Delevent program. Nothing worked. So I started over. I've made some progress, but motivation is a problem, frankly. I put over a year into the original effort. Once Seelowe is released, I'll take another shot at it.

 

[JPetroski]

Simply rewriting the events in lua will fix that problem without the need to start over as you can't presently have both the macro and lua at the same time. Did you make significant changes on the redo or were you satisfied with the first one aside from the events? If that is all this is, this can be fixed and it can be published

 

[techumseh]

Thanks John. I haven't got nearly that far on the redo. Still working on the remaking map, frankly. As for rewriting the events in Lua, it sounds much easier said than done. Even after reorganizing and rationalizing my events, I was still at used heap space of 209033 bytes.

 

[Patine]

He kids - we all know it isn't easy!!! But for what it is worth, all four of those projects seem very interesting and if there is any particular issue holding you back, I'd be happy to help brainstorm how to overcome it!

Thank-you! Here's my issues that had problem for each:
-Empire of the Rising Sun: It's game balance always wonky, but fluctuated like a pendulum in that regard. The late and great AGRICOLA did extensive playtesting on that one, and the full limits of such balance were tested. Also, American and Australian amphibious and naval engagements were near impossible to get working (creating "beachhead terrain" next to the invasion target island and spawning Marines on it by events was a promising idea though, before I took a hiatus from Civ entirely around that point). Also, China was NEVER the quagmire it should have been, and Japan always cleaned up there handily. The atomic bomb was another issue of contention. I had in my head at one point that near the end the U.S. would start researching and building it using the spaceship mechanism, leading to a race against time, but for some reason the AI only seems to build spaceships in standard vanilla games, not in scenarios - they won't even start even start them. Also, although the other six Civ's were always pretty solidly determined (Japan, the U.S., the British Empire, Thailand, and the Dutch East Indies), it was an issue I went back forth on over whether the French Indochinese and Pacific Colonies or the Siberian part of the USSR warranted the seventh slot.
-Modern Middle East: Previously, handling events was a real mess, as was getting the events results I wanted, and fine tuning military unit stats. Also, I always HATED the map I was using (literally the TINY map for the default MicroProse Alexander the Great scenario from the early Conflicts in Civilization expansion), but I couldn't find anywhere a better map that was bigger and more realistic that covered the area I wanted. Also, I never firmly settled on definite and realistic scenario objectives to actually win (perhaps a reflection of reality, but not much fun to play).
-War of the Spanish Succession: The big issue here is that this would have been my first multi-map scenario, as I wanted the European aspect and the North American colonial one (Queen Anne's War) on separate maps with different terrain and different units being buildable on both, and only large ships being able to freely traverse the two maps. At the time, I couldn't get my head around multi-map mechanics.
-Fall of Rome: At the time I conceived it, it was the limits of events that was the big kicker. I THINK Lua may actually solve many of these issues.

 

[tootall_2012]

Napoléon, which covers the European Napoleonic wars between 1805 to 1815, is the current project I was working on before TNO came back. I essentially completed the map, the graphics (units, improvements, and map), completed most of the rules.txt file though there are still some finishing touches that are required with regards the tech tree.

I was basically at the point where I was ready to start on the event file but at the time I decided to wait to see what new features TNO was going to add to ToTPP and Lua and possibly the transport mechanism before going on.

I would very much like to use lua on this project, to implement many of the great features you've introduced in you Caesar scenario, amongst possibly others, but my concern is that I still don't have enough experience/knowledge to do this on my own.

In your Gallic scenario did you first create a macro version of the event file, to serve as a guide, before tackling lua?

 

[Patine]

The sky's the limit! If you'll pardon the pun.

I have no plans to work on Aeterna Civitas right now, but I did spend a lot of time on this scenario and would like to bring it up to date at some point. If I recall correctly the bugs were with the Legion recruitment system. Basically, you built a very expensive 'Legion' unit, which then destroyed itself against a Barbarian unit (static and invincible) which then event generated an entire Legion. I can't remember the exact issues, but I know things were breaking down and I believe there were other bugs. I run out of steam and haven't been able to work up the enthusiasm to go back and fix it since.

Oh, McMonkey, I have no idea at all what symbol you're using in Aeterna Civitas for a "flag stand-in" for raising above controlled cities and maybe as a unit shield too for Carthage, but I stumbled across a reference of a symbol that was apparently used, according to the records of Greek travellers to the city before the Third Punic War, who said it was a symbol so commonly used in Carthage as to practically be vexillological. It apparently derives from the symbol of Tanit, the patron goddess of the city from the Phoenician-Canaanite pantheon. You may already know this, but I thought I'd throw it out here.

 

[JPetroski]

I would very much like to use lua on this project, to implement many of the great features you've introduced in you Caesar scenario, amongst possibly others, but my concern is that I still don't have enough experience/knowledge to do this on my own.

In your Gallic scenario did you first create a macro version of the event file, to serve as a guide, before tackling lua?

@Grishnach is the reason Gallic Wars is what it is--I did have an events file more or less built (aside from some text which was just placeholders) when Grishnach volunteered to join on and translate it. That has been instrumental to my own learning of the project, and I've been able to take that learning and at least copy and paste it into a second scenario and use some of the stuff. At some point it would be great to make another scenario league tips site that has some of the code required for things like 'k' units and 'onProduction' and such. It is a little more complicated than Macro because it's not like you just build one event in one place.
With that said, even though it looks daunting, it's really not that hard to plug in new units once you have something to work with. That is, until you miss a comma somewhere

McMonkey, Grishnach and I are curently working on a second full-sized lua scenario that will have some new stuff not yet tried. After that, we're hoping at least to pump out a few mini-scenarios (think something really quick, like the Battle of Midway) just to put some concepts into play and give everyone something to work with. I think once you have 2-3 examples to look at, you'll be able to start piecing things together more.

If you're interested in trying it with Napoleon perhaps make a rough events (not one of your 20,000 line ones JUST yet ), take Caesar as a start, and see what you can do! There are people here that can help with the big issues! I'm hoping to be one of them at least for minor stuff!

I'll bet you right now that if you sat down for a short while you could take the code from Caesar and have 'k' unit artillery firing shots at Moscow from tiles away.

 

[tootall_2012]

Hi John,

Thanks for the tips. Fortunately, in this scenario, I don't believe I will require nearly as many lines of code. I'm pretty certain I can reuse a lot of the code from your Caesar scenario, most notably for artillery units. I might have to create a parallel macro file to serve as guide for some of the many other events I would like to implement. Once I have that in place, it should make it easier to build or get help in creating the other lua functions.

I think the idea of creating a repository of existing functions would be a great addition.

 

[Civinator]

I think the idea of creating a repository of existing functions would be a great addition.

 

[Patine]

I think one of the biggest issues in my Fall of Rome scenario that makes even really getting started in earnest very difficult is whether to have a single Roman Empire player, or separate East and West Roman Empire players. There are significant advantages and disadvantages I'd envisioned in scenario design for both options - but they are mutually exclusive lists of such qualities.