[TOT] The Test Of Time Patch Project

[Greizer85]

I read the instructions for adding the custom resources... Too bad it's not a simple point-and-click job. I guess that'd be impossible without editing the map editor itself. I will most definitely use this for my Finland map, but I think my world map is good enough as it is; there's only a few minor discrepancies, like Silk in Siberia etc. It may simply be that I haven't the heart to 'discard' all my hard work from testing all the map seeds to find the optimal one for the current resource distribution. The stars really aligned on that one -- all of the other 63 were horrible in comparison. I was in the process of making a bigger world map, but it's been a while and it's hard to get back in the 'groove' of map-making, so to speak. But it is tempting with this new tool available. One must be careful not to imbalance the game too much though; after all it was designed with max 4 resources per city in mind.

Anyway, I was wondering: does 16 different terrain types mean 32 different possible resources? 'Cause if it does, hoo boy, I've got my work cut out for me! I must say it is a much more pleasant problem to run out of possible resource types to think of rather than having to cut down on their number.

Those mountains look kinda awkward due to the stretched graphic, but the concept itself is mouthwatering. Could there be three different heights, or even more perhaps? Also, about impassable terrain: would it be possible to make it so that e.g. mountains are impassable to everything but Settlers and Engineers, but once they build a Road or RR in the square, then it becomes passable for all units (and ofc if pillaged, reverts back to impassable)? (I seem to remember this being discussed somewhere; apologies if I'm asking the same questions twice.)

About the stacking issue: seems like a good enough solution to me to leave the planes in the air. AI air units have infinite fuel iirc, so it won't affect them, and the human player (if he allows his carriers to be sunk in the first place) can simply land them on another carrier (if available).

EDIT: About the terrain types: is it possible to have two (or more) different types of water terrain that are both traversible by ship (and not land units)? I could really use two different graphics for navigable rivers and oceans on my Finland map. Right now it looks like a total mess and what's worse, I can no longer remember which puddles are supposed to be lakes and which represent rivers (one of the reasons why I'm reluctant to go back to the project... I should've spared a version where I kept the original rivers intact.).

EDIT2: Maybe this is getting too technical, but how about restricting the terrains on which it is possible to settle? In this way you could greatly help the AI in its city locating decisions: simply pick a single terrain on which it is possible to settle, then place it at all ideal city locations, and presto! perfectly placed AI cities, with no actual AI tweaks whatsoever.

 

[TheNamelessOne]

Anyway, I was wondering: does 16 different terrain types mean 32 different possible resources?

Well, 30, not counting grasslands, but yeah, that's the idea. The extra terrain types will be "simple" types, like desert or plains. Not like forest or hills.

About the terrain types: is it possible to have two (or more) different types of water terrain that are both traversible by ship (and not land units)?

Many of the checks for ocean are in-lined to check for terrain type 10. If this were handled by a separate function (like whether a tile has a resource) I could change it, but unfortunately it's all over the place. So only land tiles, I'm afraid.

Those mountains look kinda awkward due to the stretched graphic, but the concept itself is mouthwatering. Could there be three different heights, or even more perhaps?

I haven't tried anything other than 48 pixels yet, and because of the possibility of changing the zoom level, the height should preferably be a multiple of 16. Maybe 64 works, but I'm guessing that's already pretty high.

Also, about impassable terrain: would it be possible to make it so that e.g. mountains are impassable to everything but Settlers and Engineers, but once they build a Road or RR in the square, then it becomes passable for all units (and ofc if pillaged, reverts back to impassable)? (I seem to remember this being discussed somewhere; apologies if I'm asking the same questions twice.)

It's not impossible, I've changed the impassable check already for air units. I'll add it to my list.

About the stacking issue: seems like a good enough solution to me to leave the planes in the air. AI air units have infinite fuel iirc, so it won't affect them, and the human player (if he allows his carriers to be sunk in the first place) can simply land them on another carrier (if available).

I agree, and the rest is working pretty well already. So it will be in the next release.

Maybe this is getting too technical, but how about restricting the terrains on which it is possible to settle?

Well, considering the type of project this is, I'm guessing there's no such thing as "too technical".
This is related to fertility, normally only grasslands and plains are considered fertile (except for the Fantasy game, where there's a hard-coded override), and the AI will only settle those terrain types. It's already on my list to make this configurable in rules.txt.

 

[PlutonianEmpire]

It's probably been posted about before, but would there be a possibility to enable the game to allow the user to add their own custom form of government without having to modify the existing ones? For example, I renamed Fundamentalism for my games and eliminated the science penalty, because I imagine this new religiously oriented government as peaceful. However, the game still treats it as an ultra-militaristic form of government, and so the AI still uses it as the go-to form of government for aggressive military campaigns, in addition to increased risk of sneak attacks by AI if the player is using that form of government

And considering that government regimes are linked to specific advances, and some advances are civ-specific, a whole new realm of gameplay, if done right.

Also, a pet peeve about putting player-controlled cities on domestic-only autobuild, far too often, a small city with just 8 shield productions will start building 600-shield wonders, even though another player city on domestic autobuild has 56 shield production and would have started the same wonder the very next turn had the small-ish city not snatched it first.

 

[Greizer85]

Many of the checks for ocean are in-lined to check for terrain type 10. If this were handled by a separate function (like whether a tile has a resource) I could change it, but unfortunately it's all over the place. So only land tiles, I'm afraid.

I'm a bit shattered by your magical powers not extending to everything. However, might it be possible to circumvent this issue -- by making a land terrain type traversible by ships as well as land units? This would fit the River terrain extremely well; and as an added bonus, where rivers were meant to be non-navigable, I could use the default river overlay. Please tell me that this is possible (crosses fingers).

I haven't tried anything other than 48 pixels yet, and because of the possibility of changing the zoom level, the height should preferably be a multiple of 16. Maybe 64 works, but I'm guessing that's already pretty high.

Cool! Another idea just popped in my head regarding this, and it is a very cool one (if I do say so myself): by 'appropriating' the mountain or hill overlay graphic (or even river or forest) for a special purpose, it becomes possible to make 'plateau' borders and have realistic-looking height differences in Civ II! Due to the great number of additional terrain types, this shouldn't be too much of a problem: just take e.g. the mountain graphic for the plateau-making, then have a few different-looking mountain terrains with identical stats. Or you could go the other way around and have the new terrains as differently facing plateau borders, I suppose (it's just easier to keep them next to each other so you won't get disoriented, which is easier to do in the Terrain2 file).

EDIT: I think you can actually do this even without the heightened mountains. I wonder why no one's ever tried it? I wish I could draw to save my life, to help illustrate the concept. Basically you have a 'sloping ridge' tile (or tiles, to accommodate all the various angles and countours of the plateau) that leads from one height to another -- like a half-hill of sorts. This creates the illusion of real height differences on the map. You can simply use normal hills and mountains 'inside' the plateau, and they will appear higher than the surrounding, 'non-plateau' ones. A talented graphical artist could probably whip this up in a day or two (are there any such persons around? ).

I ramble on a bit, but the concept itself is sound. Perhaps there's something I've missed, but it seems like this is one of those things that ought to have been tried ages ago.

It's not impossible, I've changed the impassable check already for air units. I'll add it to my list.

Great to hear. ... This probably means that the river thing is possible, too? Just add a check, 'if a tile has a river on it = traversible by ship'? No non-navigable rivers then, unless I use a land-graphic for that instead (funny how you can flip things around like this and eke out convenience from weird places).

Well, considering the type of project this is, I'm guessing there's no such thing as "too technical".
This is related to fertility, normally only grasslands and plains are considered fertile (except for the Fantasy game, where there's a hard-coded override), and the AI will only settle those terrain types. It's already on my list to make this configurable in rules.txt.

Even better, since this means that the human can settle anywhere he pleases, while the AI is restricted by the terrain. Now if only you could get them to name their cities correctly... (This is not an actual request, btw. Although maybe an event could be made for it? 'If founding city on tile xx,yy, then name city zzz'? It's a bit of work, but there's room for maybe 150 cities on my Finland map, so it's certainly doable.)

 

[PlutonianEmpire]

More things I've noticed:

When creating new single player games from the main menu, the amount of enemy civs you want to play against is generally 3. However, I noticed for multiplayer games, the number is two. On a hunch, I edited game.txt to allow the player to play with just on civ (themself), and lo and behold, the new game loaded with me as the only civ, and it didn't even take me to the end screens, I could play as myself with full scoring enabled. Personally, I like it , sometimes I just wanna go solo, without pesky AI. Yeah, defeats the purpose of he whole game, but not everyone plays game the way they're meant to be played, as lots of you already know.

However, I brought it up because I am curious as to what the limits of the other options are when adding to game.txt. For example, I added the "2 billion years" to the top of the selection list on the "select age" dialog when building custom worlds, but how do I know if that's correct? As in, how do I know I didn't mislabel it or offset it, causing 3-billion year old worlds to be incorrectly labeled as 2 billion while making 5-billion year old worlds 6-billion year old worlds?

Also, I have noticed that when entering goodie huts on multimap games where certain units are banned from specific maps, the hut will give you that banned unit on that map. Including barbarians and units the civ isn't allowed to build.

And speaking about goodie huts, would it be possible to tell the game to not give the player certain items when entering them? For example, I highly doubt the realism that a civ with modern-day techs in a normal or extended game would encounter a tiny, undiscovered tribe that's at the same tech level and give them a size four city.

And finally, I might have mentioned it before in this thread, but Ive noticed that when putting my civ on "autopilot" and playing an AI game, barbarian uprisings rarely occur and are always much smaller than when a player is around, when uprising or hording up on land, even with unclaimed territory ripe for such barbarian activity. Also I vageuly remember from my MGE days, that when selecting barbarian activity during game setup, selecting "roving bands" seemed to produce MORE barbarians than even "raging hordes". Can anyone confirm or refute, for any version of civ 2?

 

[goldmage162]

For some reason, when playing the extended version of the original game, if I save the game and then quit, when I reload the game, Centaurus no longer exists. Easy to see by looking at the civilopedia before and after saving and quitting.

 

[KMRblue1027]

For some reason, when playing the extended version of the original game, if I save the game and then quit, when I reload the game, Centaurus no longer exists. Easy to see by looking at the civilopedia before and after saving and quitting.

Are you accidentally saving in the wrong folder?

 

[goldmage162]

Are you accidentally saving in the wrong folder?

Maybe, but to be honest, I really don't know....

Here's where I'm saving it:

[/URL][/IMG]

 

[PlutonianEmpire]

In that case, yes, you are. If you play an "Extended Original" game, you need to save it in the folder of the same name, otherwise it won't work.

 

[Catfish]

I like how things get partially obscured behind the mountains, it really does add depth to the map (I just stretched the bitmaps in terrain2.bmp for this screenshot, it will look even better when someone creates proper 48 pixel mountain bitmaps (Catfish? ))

I doubt I'm much of a mountain drawer, but I might be able to tweak some existing ones. It's been a long time since I've made any graphics for Civ2. Following are a couple of larger mountain examples. In both cases the mountains are units.

From the ToT conversion of Alex Mor's & Captain Nemo's Spartacus scenario:

Spoiler :

From The Monarch's mod of my War of the Ring scenario (mountains are adapted from Favoured Flight's):

Spoiler :

Spoiler :

 

[goldmage162]

Maybe, but to be honest, I really don't know....

Here's where I'm saving it:

[/URL][/IMG]

COuld you possibly tell me how to find said folder, talking to someone who would have no idea how to find it on his own?

 

[Greizer85]

@Catfish: Wow! Those mountains look great, especially the ones in the first pic. I must look into some ToT graphics for my project (if I ever get around to it... Rethinking the entire tech tree atm.).

What about my 'plateau borders' idea though? This is from Age of Empires, but it gets the point across fairly well (need gentler slopes for Civ, but the same concept otherwise):

Spoiler :

EDIT: There actually *are* gentle slopes in the pic, too; they're a little *too* gentle, though. Something in between the two that looks kind of like a hill cut in half would be the best on the scale that Civ II works on, I think.

 

[PlutonianEmpire]

I doubt I'm much of a mountain drawer, but I might be able to tweak some existing ones. It's been a long time since I've made any graphics for Civ2. Following are a couple of larger mountain examples. In both cases the mountains are units.

From the ToT conversion of Alex Mor's & Captain Nemo's Spartacus scenario:

Spoiler :

From The Monarch's mod of my War of the Ring scenario (mountains are adapted from Favoured Flight's):

Spoiler :

Spoiler :

Those look nice! Did you try something similar for hills? Or would that be sorta pushing it at this point?

 

[PlutonianEmpire]

Umm... Is it me, or is Pluto getting AGW even with no polluted tiles whatsoever?

In addition, I've noticed that the settlers on AI, both player controlled settlers on 'K' autopilot and settlers belonging to AI civs, sometimes create irrigation out of "thin air", in the sense that an irrigation tile will appear even though there aren't any water/river/irrigated tiles for dozens of tiles around.

(For the attachment, you might need to play it for a few turns. You might also get a sneak attack or two. I got one, but couldn't remember if it happened before or after saving the save file, bugs3.sav)

 

[Catfish]

COuld you possibly tell me how to find said folder, talking to someone who would have no idea how to find it on his own?

It's the ExtendedOriginal folder found inside the main Test of Time folder. You should be able to move the saved games there from the Scifi folder and reload them.

What about my 'plateau borders' idea though?

Escarpments with plateaus are feasible (they would tile like the attached pic). Terraced mountains would be more problematic.

Did you try something similar for hills?

No, I haven't mucked around with larger hills. BTW, I had nothing to do with the large mountains in the last two pics. They're a little large for a 64 x 48 box. It would still require some kind of manually placed multi-tile composite, eg, 3 x 3 planets.

In addition, I've noticed that the settlers on AI, both player controlled settlers on 'K' autopilot and settlers belonging to AI civs, sometimes create irrigation out of "thin air", in the sense that an irrigation tile will appear even though there aren't any water/river/irrigated tiles for dozens of tiles around.

The AI players cheat. That's OK. It probably wasn't intended for the automated settlers belonging to human players.

 

[ALongHardKnight]

I know it's gotta be here somewhere, but I can't find it. Started using the ToTPP v0.2 and ... can't save games... I know the ability has to be there but ... running Windoze 7, 64-bit, hard drive partitioned into 3 logical drives, games residing on d: (specifically - D:\games\Civilization\II - Test of Time.

Thanks for all the work.

 

[goldmage162]

Ah, I see them...never noticed that before...probably because I didn't know to be keeping an eye out for them.

 

[TheNamelessOne]

However, might it be possible to circumvent this issue -- by making a land terrain type traversible by ships as well as land units? [...] This probably means that the river thing is possible, too? Just add a check, 'if a tile has a river on it = traversible by ship'?

Theoretically, I guess it would be possible. However, ships are not meant to be on land tiles, for example ships in combat on land tiles are "caught in port" and fight with penalties. So I doubt it would work well in practice.

When creating new single player games from the main menu, the amount of enemy civs you want to play against is generally 3. However, I noticed for multiplayer games, the number is two. On a hunch, I edited game.txt to allow the player to play with just on civ (themself), and lo and behold, the new game loaded with me as the only civ, and it didn't even take me to the end screens, I could play as myself with full scoring enabled. Personally, I like it , sometimes I just wanna go solo, without pesky AI. Yeah, defeats the purpose of he whole game, but not everyone plays game the way they're meant to be played, as lots of you already know.

However, I brought it up because I am curious as to what the limits of the other options are when adding to game.txt. For example, I added the "2 billion years" to the top of the selection list on the "select age" dialog when building custom worlds, but how do I know if that's correct? As in, how do I know I didn't mislabel it or offset it, causing 3-billion year old worlds to be incorrectly labeled as 2 billion while making 5-billion year old worlds 6-billion year old worlds?

The labels of the different options don't mean anything to the game itself, they get assigned values, the first option is 0, the second is 1, etc. For @ENEMIES, as you figured out, the resulting number of enemies in the game is 6 - <option value>. So only adding values to the end of the list cause new, higher option values to appear. If you add "2 billion years" at the top, it will get value 0, and act like it was "3 billion years", etc. But adding "6 billion years" at the bottom will result in a value of 3 for the world age, which has an effect on the map generation.

And speaking about goodie huts, would it be possible to tell the game to not give the player certain items when entering them? For example, I highly doubt the realism that a civ with modern-day techs in a normal or extended game would encounter a tiny, undiscovered tribe that's at the same tech level and give them a size four city.

Disabling some of the rewards should be possible. I'll put it on my list.

 

[PlutonianEmpire]

Question: While I think I can easily guess that the designers made this part deliberate, one thing that has always bugged me was the AI's unwillingness to start nuking each other out of the blue. They don't seem to hold their punches when using nuclear-type units against the player, but they never used nuclear units against other AI unless the player cheated and intervened by switching to said AI civ and doing the dastardly deeds themselves.

So, feature request: Would it be possible to apply an on/off switch or checkbox to the AI's nuclear self-restraint with other AI?

 

[Greizer85]

Theoretically, I guess it would be possible. However, ships are not meant to be on land tiles, for example ships in combat on land tiles are "caught in port" and fight with penalties. So I doubt it would work well in practice.

I could simply make boats cheap but risky to use. The aesthetic benefit is imo well worth it. The text could simply be edited (to something like 'Your ship is ambushed from the shore!'). If it's not too much trouble, I'd appreciate this possibility; ofc I realize it's not high priority.

Disabling some of the rewards should be possible. I'll put it on my list.

Is it possible to disable huts altogether? In the default game or ToTPP? I just realized that I have no use for them, as they only add needless randomness to the game. And getting techs from huts would be disastrous for balance, as there will only be about 30 techs in my scenario, containing everything the standard game has.

Also, I second the nuclear option that PlutonianEmpire suggested.