Version 2.8beta

[zappara]

How about making a Core RoM, and then a addon pack (or call it Part II) with all the added movies/new leaders (from2.71, not the Megapack)/selected modmods and new sounds.
That would :
a. make it possible for low end machines to run RoM without too much hassle.
b. make it possible for low bandwidth internetusers to download it.
c. make it possible for you (Zappara) to not have to use hours upon hours to upload a 450MB file with the repeated corruptions in installerfile/rar. My guess is it would give a lot more succesrate to upload 4x100MB files or 2x200MB files than 1x400MB file.
d. make it possible for the player to customize RoM to a better degree.

Just a suggestion

I have something similar planned already. Great minds think alike RoM Lite will be without modules (except few really small ones) and without movies - that drops the rar file size to half.

I poste here, because I thought maybe Zappara could include your "fixed" font files in his 2.8 core releases?

2.8beta uses the gamefonts that vincentz said should work with his guilds/corporations - though there's the possibility of human error, ie. I might have included the wrong gamefont as I got whole bunch of them on my computer. I'm sure vincentz will correct me if I've made a mistake.

 

[mike_cf]

comes from out of nowhere, or, more specifically, the ocean tiles that my galleys don't get to go on

Yes, this is annoying for me too. My triremes always get lost in the ocean, while theirs have no problems. In civ 2-3(?) there was a 50/50 chance to lose a ship in the ocean before you got galleons and I thought it was the same case here. I think it's better to have a small chance to navigate the ocean on a galley rather than none.

Started a new game, just build my first city. I entered the city view, pressed ctrl-a (trying to see the abandon city feature). A popup appeared to select the building I wanted destroyed, the drop box was empty and when I pressed cancel, got a CTD, twice with the same 'formula'. I'll try it again when I'll have more cities.

 

[MisterBenn]

I'm personally a fan of not allowing ocean travel at all for the early ships, particularly since I lost a ship that took a route different from the preview I was given and hence spent a turn in an ocean square and promptly sank. Now I often move my ships just one turn's worth at a time as I am paranoid of it happening again!

Luckily, one of Afforess' modmods can make the ocean rule change if you prefer, although I haven't tried them out with the 2.8 beta yet.

 

[cr0ws]

I just noticed that the privateer bug is STILL THERE! The one where it says that is has "2 cargo space" but it cannot load anything? Please do not forget about it this time!

 

[Dancing Hoskuld]

I have something similar planned already. Great minds think alike RoM Lite will be without modules (except few really small ones) and without movies - that drops the rar file size to half.

2.8beta uses the gamefonts that vincentz said should work with his guilds/corporations - though there's the possibility of human error, ie. I might have included the wrong gamefont as I got whole bunch of them on my computer. I'm sure vincentz will correct me if I've made a mistake.

An idea/thought for the movies pack. In the base pack, have the XML for the movies all there pointing to a movie file of the correct name. Have a static movie which is either an appropriate picture or a note to down load the movie pack or a picture requesting that someone create a movie. That way no one needs to change the XML just put the movie in the right place with the right name. This could also work for the national wonder movies that AAranda has linked in. As well as any other wonders people want to add. I should be able to do a quick and rough "Download movie pack x for movie" or "Movie required, please apply your talents "

 

[Lamb Chop]

There is something funky with ancient relic resource.
I had never paid any attention is it supposed to give -2 F and + 1 C?Also in my current 2.8 Beta game, i only had 2 of those, 1 was in city borders 1 was in cultural. So being a good boy I built a archeological dig and a fort like normal. City was getting the gold etc from it but AR resource in city screen civ wide went down to 1.
Than I thought fort must not work with AR and built a dig on the second too. and than I had no AR res. at all.
Can we possibly make it so Forts don't claim res. anyway?

 

[Crusis]

I pretty much agree with all the ocean travel comments. It is very destabilizing, unfair that the AI gets to use terrain that we do not, forces us to spend extra cash on coastal defense where none should be needed at this point in the game, and isn't taken into consideration by the tracking software and sometimes you will lose a ship because the tracking algorithms decided the ocean path was the shortest with no regard for the penalty of traveling there.

This 'feature' forces me to play with no barbarians, forces me to use the world editor to delete any enemy fleet if it shows up at my border without dying on the ocean. Oddly enough some AI DO pay the penalty, and I've seen the AI send a ship into the sea to die in a storm, build another in the same city which follows the same path and dies in a storm, etc. That city becomes locked in a loop of suicidal galleys.

Zappara, you have made the best Civ mod I have ever seen. RoM is so amazing that Firaxis should be sending you a letter requesting you to work for them, because you made the game a thousand times better than it was.

This ocean travel, however, proves that nobody is right all the time. You've made a terrible mistake with it, unless you have some plans on improving it to counter the issues that everyone has. I don't like having to enter the world editor. I don't like playing without barbarians, in fact I prefer them raging. But, for now, you leave me no choice but to do these things to fix what you have broken. Which is a shame, because the methods you used prior to 2.7 were awesome.

Thanks for the wonderful game mod, for now I find myself playing more and more Empire: Total War because RoM is really what makes Civ IV still playable years after release. But RoM is itself broken now.

 

[duraknots]

I really like the fact that your units die if they enter the ocean at such an early time in the game; this brings about the realism with actual ocean travel.

I've been out in the open ocean sailing. It would be incredibly easy to lose your direction if you didn't have some sort of guide like the stars or a modern instrument, ESPECIALLY at night. Letting the units die is a lot like this; they can't find land and thus perish lost at sea. Having the Civs learn technologies that require ocean travel parallels how our ancestors needed knowledge before they could go venturing out into the unknown.

There is always a chance you could find your way back to land however even with out instruments... do you think it's possible, before ocean travel techs have been discovered, to have your sea unit go in directions that are randomized despite giving it a direct movement order after it enters an ocean tile? (much like getting lost at sea)

e.g. say the Sea Unit is 1 tile from a coastline north and east of it, you try to move it east but it goes north or Southwest.

Or perhaps a probability of actually losing your sea unit before ocean travel techs are learned?

e.g. Sea unit is 1 tile from a coastline in an ocean tile, probability of getting lost amd dieing at sea is 25%

Once again this applies to the early era of civilizations, when people didn't know to look to the stars to help guide them.

Furthermore i like the early defense of having to defend your fishing boats from marauding pirates, makes the game more challenging. : )

Btw
Zappara, THANK YOU SO MUCH for this fantastic mod. The time and effort you've taken out of your own life in order to making this great mod and even sharing it with the rest of the community shows real character. Several of my friends have started playing this mod as well and they can't wait for 2.8!

 

[scribbler]

Regarding the ocean travel, a better way, aside from being lost in a storm, is that the early units end up going in a random direction, with the originating civ losing control and the ship going to a new civ.

Now, if they return to the originating civ, that civ gets back control of the unit (with happiness bonuses and maybe some tech bonuses), but if they don't, as soon as they make landfall on a passable and unclaimed tile, they become a settler that builds a city immediately. OTOH, if they enter someone else's borders (that isn't on the same continent) they can offer to enter that civ's service, with that civ gaining a little bonus to culture and research in areas that the originating civ is ahead.

 

[Dancing Hoskuld]

I was just about to start on making the list in the Abandon City mod alphabetical when I thought I should test it as is first. The text keys are missing TXT_KEY_ABANDON_CITY_HEADER1 and TXT_KEY_ABANDON_CITY_HEADER2. The attached file should fix it. It goes in the assets/xml/text folder. (Uncompress it first)

 

[zappara]

I pretty much agree with all the ocean travel comments. It is very destabilizing, unfair that the AI gets to use terrain that we do not, forces us to spend extra cash on coastal defense where none should be needed at this point in the game, and isn't taken into consideration by the tracking software and sometimes you will lose a ship because the tracking algorithms decided the ocean path was the shortest with no regard for the penalty of traveling there.

This 'feature' forces me to play with no barbarians, forces me to use the world editor to delete any enemy fleet if it shows up at my border without dying on the ocean. Oddly enough some AI DO pay the penalty, and I've seen the AI send a ship into the sea to die in a storm, build another in the same city which follows the same path and dies in a storm, etc. That city becomes locked in a loop of suicidal galleys.

The sinking of ships is handled with random events and those do happen for all players, including AI players, so the rules are exactly same for everyone - barbarians are exception since their units can spawn on any plot that is in fog-of-war. Now the way these sinking random events work is that early game these happen individually for each player whenever it is possible to trigger it and thus this makes it difficult to explore ocean plots if you have just one ship - the sinking chance is 75% so there's a possibility that ship survives through this event. Now if you have more than one ship, you'll have much higher chance of getting over ocean because this random event can trigger only once per turn, ie.
if you have 3 ships in your fleet and set them to scout ocean, it would take 3 turns to get them all sunk, though it's possible that all 3 survive (for one ship the odds are 0.25*0.25*0.25 = 1.5% for 3 turns of ocean travel).

Once enough sea based techs have been researched the random events change a bit and the sinking effect no longer happen per individual player (instead it's global event) and not every turn - thus the chance to cross increases once you reach classical/medieval era.

Also travelling on ocean plots inside your own cultural borders is safe - you could think of it as "the sailors know the local waters".

Remember that all this applies to AI players as well.


By the way, if you are interested reading how humans spread to all continents, check out Genographic Project - I'm just checking it too. Though this is bit unrelated to the ship event thing above...

Edit: Has anyone tested if those other languages are working correctly? Translations are incomplete but at least spanish, french, italian, german languages should work now.

edit: i just noticed that the civic upkeep is zero. I made a screenshot of it.

Civic upkeep seems to function correctly on my computer - didn't see any issue with it.

For some reason the game is very unstable in the early turns. Every time fog is popped, the game hesitates deciding whether to crash. This also happened in my first game, but things smoothed out after all the initial fog was explored.

I might have found one possible cause for early CTDs and it was with conscription units so I rearranged them to fix the bug.

I just noticed that the privateer bug is STILL THERE! The one where it says that is has "2 cargo space" but it cannot load anything? Please do not forget about it this time!

I'll check it. If I recall it was set to carry people ie. not regular units but spies, missionaries etc.

Started a new game, just build my first city. I entered the city view, pressed ctrl-a (trying to see the abandon city feature). A popup appeared to select the building I wanted destroyed, the drop box was empty and when I pressed cancel, got a CTD, twice with the same 'formula'. I'll try it again when I'll have more cities.

Hmm, that's odd. I'll have to test it again - it has worked just fine in earlier tests.

 

[cr0ws]

I'll check it. If I recall it was set to carry people ie. not regular units but spies, missionaries etc.

Just to save you some time, I've already tried it on special units like spies, great people and settlers but with no success.

 

[Dancing Hoskuld]

Originally Posted by mike_cf View Post
Started a new game, just build my first city. I entered the city view, pressed ctrl-a (trying to see the abandon city feature). A popup appeared to select the building I wanted destroyed, the drop box was empty and when I pressed cancel, got a CTD, twice with the same 'formula'. I'll try it again when I'll have more cities.

Hmm, that's odd. I'll have to test it again - it has worked just fine in earlier tests.

The Abandon City mod code with 2.8beta has gone back to displaying a the popup even when you have only one city and it has no buildings.

It is the bit that was commented out 2.7 - line 124 onward. The code had a "> 1" rather than "== 1" which was causing it to not let you abandon any city so the whole code block was commented out reintroducing the CTD that it was written to fix. I thought I had posted that fix - oh well!

Unfortunately I am working on the code now and don't have a copy that works right. I am working on getting the building list in alphabetical order and only containing buildings that can be sold. I was adding some user options to the INI file also which is why I don't have a working copy

Edit: Attached is a copy of the code which does not cause CTD when called by a player with a single city which does not have any buildings. Also list no longer has free buildings in it. It goes in the python directory if anyone wants to test it.

(On to alphabetical order!)

 

[DavidB1111]

Alright, Zappara, you're the boss. Although, I don't know why no one else has trouble with Atomic Gamer. I mean, even File Planet isn't as bad.

 

[Bezhukov]

The sinking of ships is handled with random events and those do happen for all players, including AI players, so the rules are exactly same for everyone - barbarians are exception since their units can spawn on any plot that is in fog-of-war. Now the way these sinking random events work is that early game these happen individually for each player whenever it is possible to trigger it and thus this makes it difficult to explore ocean plots if you have just one ship - the sinking chance is 75% so there's a possibility that ship survives through this event. Now if you have more than one ship, you'll have much higher chance of getting over ocean because this random event can trigger only once per turn, ie.
if you have 3 ships in your fleet and set them to scout ocean, it would take 3 turns to get them all sunk, though it's possible that all 3 survive (for one ship the odds are 0.25*0.25*0.25 = 1.5% for 3 turns of ocean travel).

Once enough sea based techs have been researched the random events change a bit and the sinking effect no longer happen per individual player (instead it's global event) and not every turn - thus the chance to cross increases once you reach classical/medieval era.

Also travelling on ocean plots inside your own cultural borders is safe - you could think of it as "the sailors know the local waters".

Remember that all this applies to AI players as well.

.

Zap, ships are sinking on ocean tiles within borders (especially annoying when the pathing graphic is inaccurate), and AI are circumnavigating the globe with single exploring ships as early as 2500BC (snail), so something isn't working right.

I agree that ideally the possibility of early ships reaching new continents is both historically accurate and strategically appealing, but the events system is an awkward place to implement what you're trying to accomplish (I'd like to turn events off until they're overhauled for RoM, but can't because I'd like some restriction on early ocean travel).

 

[Bezhukov]

One idea that would significantly improve AI performance is allowing the river buildings (irrigated canals, levees, and oil refineries) for any city with fresh water river tiles within its borders. The AI seems incapable of placing cities that qualify in the usual way, with various deleterious effects.

 

[civ_chemist]

I can't find this mentioned elsewhere, but I have noticed that it still happens in 2.8beta.
If I accidentally click end turn with a unit selected, even if it has existing orders, a CTD occurs every time. Has anyone else noticed this?
I am getting better at remembering, but it is frustrating when it happens.

 

[Bezhukov]

Small bug - cottages are not maturing under Caste and Church when the civics are combined.

As for the economics, I like how Republic allows larger armies (Monarchy has the +1 cost per unit), so leaving that downside in Monarchy seems a good thing, but maybe looking at other ways to boost the economy at that stage could help one (especially the AI) actually get to Republic in the first place.

 

[zappara]

Zap, ships are sinking on ocean tiles within borders (especially annoying when the pathing graphic is inaccurate), and AI are circumnavigating the globe with single exploring ships as early as 2500BC (snail), so something isn't working right.

It could be one other sea event I made long time ago (a year or so?) when I added bunch of events to RoM - There was sinking and getting stuck into reef events among those new events.

 

[dudeSDCA]

Zap, ships are sinking on ocean tiles within borders (especially annoying when the pathing graphic is inaccurate), and AI are circumnavigating the globe with single exploring ships as early as 2500BC (snail), so something isn't working right.

I agree that ideally the possibility of early ships reaching new continents is both historically accurate and strategically appealing, but the events system is an awkward place to implement what you're trying to accomplish (I'd like to turn events off until they're overhauled for RoM, but can't because I'd like some restriction on early ocean travel).

I wonder if the "cheat" where the AI actually knows the map (incl. hidden) allows them to move their ships "strategically" to avoid sinking...?