will there ever come a CTP3??
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Arius Mephisto
Chieftain
Well, knowing activision... they'll make a sequel as soon as there's a market again, ie next year.... they're likely to make on and I hope it does something innovative, unline CTP2
freestyler
Chieftain
Nope, There will be no CTP3, UNLESS some company buys the rights to do it.
"Activision gave up on the CTP series alltogether"
"Activision gave up on the CTP series alltogether"
Sorry to hear the bad news 
Personally my favorite civ game have been CTP2. Yes i know it looks allmost similar to CTP1, but i still like it better with the new improvements in the game( before CTP2 my favorite was CTP1).
I cant understand all these people who think the CTP series sucks(actually i think that because they have been playing the Civ-games they havent really carred to take the patience to really learn the game and all the good aspects in it. They have only focused on the bad stuff and critizised it because CTP does´nt look like civ)
The only thing i can add is to write this: Activision PLEASSSSEEE make CTP3. There are some of us out here, who really LOVE your games, and the new way to play the genre.
Personally my favorite civ game have been CTP2. Yes i know it looks allmost similar to CTP1, but i still like it better with the new improvements in the game( before CTP2 my favorite was CTP1).
I cant understand all these people who think the CTP series sucks(actually i think that because they have been playing the Civ-games they havent really carred to take the patience to really learn the game and all the good aspects in it. They have only focused on the bad stuff and critizised it because CTP does´nt look like civ)
The only thing i can add is to write this: Activision PLEASSSSEEE make CTP3. There are some of us out here, who really LOVE your games, and the new way to play the genre.
The Rusty Gamer
Prince
Patching up CT2 first to fix some of the bugs first would be nice.
Alot of people felt they were stung by Activision pulling support before the game had reached its full potential and will not quickly flock to buy CTP3.
Alot of people felt they were stung by Activision pulling support before the game had reached its full potential and will not quickly flock to buy CTP3.
Immortal Wombat
Prince and Prophet
http://apolyton.net/forums
The number of bugs fixed is going on all of them. (Now we just wait for the site to come back online)
Martin Gühmann
Chieftain
That's right. CTP2 can be fixed without the support of a big company and without changing the source code.
To be more on topic. I wouldn't buy any game by Activision in the future except a CTP3.
But I think they won't make it.
-Marin
To be more on topic. I wouldn't buy any game by Activision in the future except a CTP3.
But I think they won't make it. -Marin
The Rusty Gamer
Prince
They can't fix the bugs in the EXE, one of them being big delays when an opposing civ gets a miltary unit from a goody hut. There are other things as well, alot of the "fixes" or mods are workarounds using SLIC and so on. The AI is pretty bad in CTP2 and I think there is a limit on how this can be worked around with mods, again you would have to get into the EXE to fix it properly I believe.
Maybe if Activision were to give us the code of the game since they can't be bothered fixing it themselves, but that doesn't seem likely.
Immortal Wombat
Prince and Prophet
You could disable the ability to get units in goody huts. Not ideal by any means, but.
Technically, the AI could be completely rewritten, up to Civ3 standard and beyond, the fact that it would take the united community over 10,000 hours is the only thing stopping us.
Locutus
King of the Collective
Actually, AFAICS that problem is related to the size and complexity of the tech tree so having a small and straightforward tech-tree - as opposed to the current large and complex (i.e. with many cross-links) ones - would solve the problem as well. Not a bug in the EXE per se, just very inefficient programming (which, unfortunately, is all too common in modern computer programs, games or apps)...
Of course, most of us still see bigger as better so that's not really gonna happen either. However, even for something like this a work-around with SLIC is not entirely impossible: one could make it so that you greatly increase the chance to get a settler from a goody hut and use SLIC to determine if settlers that are being created are created from goody huts. If so, roll a dice and possibly kill the settler and replace it with some military unit. One could even create new events this way, such as PW from goody huts or damaging/repairing the units that enter the hut, or infecting the units with an exotic disease and thus causing a plague, etc. Certainly possible but it requires some work...
I see you are a guy of conservative estimates
Immortal Wombat
Prince and Prophet
YesOriginally posted by Locutus
I see you are a guy of conservative estimates
Martin Gühmann
Chieftain
Maybe the problem lies in not pobaly adjusted text files. Did someone played a little bit around with these settings in DiffDB.txt:
Code:
AI_INTELLIGENCE_FACTOR 1
AI_GANG_UP_FACTOR 1
DISTANCE_FROM_CAPITOL_ADJUSTMENT 0
AI_DISTANCE_FROM_CAPITOL_ADJUSTMENT 0
POLLUTION_ADJUST 0For all difficuilt settings the values are the same in the default DiffDB.txt.
Only Daves Cra_DiffDB.txt has a number of 25 for AI inteligence factor on the highest difficuilt setting impossible.
I also took a look into the CTP1 DiffDB.txt the same values for all difficuilties.
So the question: Tried anyone to increase the number and if yes what are the effects is the AI more intelegent if you are raising the number for AI intelegence factor? Will the AI gang upon the human if you raise the AI gang up factor?
I have no real idea what distance from capitol adjust and pollution adjust could be.
-Martin
Martin,
I vaguely recall experimenting with those settings in CTP1. I think I set both AI_INTELLIGENCE_FACTOR and AI_GANG_UP_FACTOR to 100. (Daniel Frappier, a Montreal based programmer, recommended multiplying such a parameter by a factor of about 100 if you wanted to see what effect it was having in a program.) I'm pretty sure it made no difference and that these data were not used in CTP1; apparently CTP1 contains quite a lot of unused stuff. I think in CTP2 they're just leftovers (like in civilisation.txt, each civilisation has an entry like 'PERSONALITY_DESCRIPTION_WAR_FEW' which is an unused leftover from CTP1).
Immortal Wombat and Locutus,
As for the AI generally, actually I think you guys are being too pessimistic.
The last BIG design fault that I can think of is the problem of getting the AI to employ proper air/navel tactics (amphibious invasions and air raids from aircraft carriers). This, admittedly, could involve some pretty intensive SLICing.
But so far as getting the AI to use better strategies is concerned, I think it's quite do-able. For example, there are two things it doesn't do that it obviously should do:
1) It doesn't employ it's war strategies enough (STRATEGY_SEIGE, STRATEGY_ATTACK, STRATEGY_DEFEND). These can be refined and maybe we even want to add some new ones (say STRATEGY_BOMBARD_UNITS, which really prioritizes that goal - which wasn't in the original game - but is a strategy that isn't used very often). There's no real problem in getting an AI civ to use these strategies, it's just getting it to use the proper strategy at the right time.
2) There's the problem of getting a weaker AI civ to attack a stronger human. This must be one of the major gripes about the game: once a human player gets into a strong position, the AI civs won't do anything. Richard Myers suggested how to do this and, IIRC, I tried it out and it works. (But I never did work out the proper diplomacy settings, so that it wouldn't immediately accept a ceasefire.)
Anyway, although it's the AI that everybody really complains about (going back to CTP1), and so it's 'the big challenge', I'm confident that we'll eventually get it sorted out.
I vaguely recall experimenting with those settings in CTP1. I think I set both AI_INTELLIGENCE_FACTOR and AI_GANG_UP_FACTOR to 100. (Daniel Frappier, a Montreal based programmer, recommended multiplying such a parameter by a factor of about 100 if you wanted to see what effect it was having in a program.) I'm pretty sure it made no difference and that these data were not used in CTP1; apparently CTP1 contains quite a lot of unused stuff. I think in CTP2 they're just leftovers (like in civilisation.txt, each civilisation has an entry like 'PERSONALITY_DESCRIPTION_WAR_FEW' which is an unused leftover from CTP1).
Immortal Wombat and Locutus,
As for the AI generally, actually I think you guys are being too pessimistic.
The last BIG design fault that I can think of is the problem of getting the AI to employ proper air/navel tactics (amphibious invasions and air raids from aircraft carriers). This, admittedly, could involve some pretty intensive SLICing.
But so far as getting the AI to use better strategies is concerned, I think it's quite do-able. For example, there are two things it doesn't do that it obviously should do:
1) It doesn't employ it's war strategies enough (STRATEGY_SEIGE, STRATEGY_ATTACK, STRATEGY_DEFEND). These can be refined and maybe we even want to add some new ones (say STRATEGY_BOMBARD_UNITS, which really prioritizes that goal - which wasn't in the original game - but is a strategy that isn't used very often). There's no real problem in getting an AI civ to use these strategies, it's just getting it to use the proper strategy at the right time.
2) There's the problem of getting a weaker AI civ to attack a stronger human. This must be one of the major gripes about the game: once a human player gets into a strong position, the AI civs won't do anything. Richard Myers suggested how to do this and, IIRC, I tried it out and it works. (But I never did work out the proper diplomacy settings, so that it wouldn't immediately accept a ceasefire.)
Anyway, although it's the AI that everybody really complains about (going back to CTP1), and so it's 'the big challenge', I'm confident that we'll eventually get it sorted out.
Immortal Wombat
Prince and Prophet
How much SLIC would it take to narrow down all the situations to the ones where it is necessary? Do we need to do some number juggling to figure out relative strengths and er... stuff...
Lets hope so. Disenchanted Civ3 players need something to play
Martin Gühmann
Chieftain
You suggest that the AI never use these war strategies if it is in war with someone else?
For the weaker AI problem, I found something in the Apolyton Modification section concerning the strategies.txt (fortunatly I saved these pages on my harddrive):
For me this suggest if a fear priority is very high like FearMilitaryRank than this civ wouldn't attack another with a big army.
It also suggest if the FearTradeRank priority very high this civ wouldn't attack another civ that has a high income from trade either. But trade is worth nothing if you have not a big army. So here is my question did try anyone to set these numbers on zero and watched what happened?
Would this mean if I set all the values of the Offensive block to zero, it would turn any stack with an offensive goal into a suicide command? The Special block for instance has only values of zero for all force matches otherwise I think special units would never attack as they have no attack, defence, ranged, bombard or value abilities.
-Martin
My impression was that it uses the SEIGE strategy, which is the one that prioritizes capturing cities, quite rarely. I think it usually uses the goal priorities from it's discovery strategy, even when it's at war. That's one of the main reasons why Cradle works well, look what David did to the goal priorities in the Militarist's discovery strategy (STRATEGY_MILITARIST_DEFAULT):
Code:
Original Cradle
GOAL_DEFEND 557k 657k
GOAL_SEIGE 405k 705k
GOAL_ATTACK 405k 850k
GOAL_BOMBARD 407k 700kIn the original game, even when it's fighting a war it's primarily interested in defending it's cities. (Sound familiar? Even tonight, Richard III said just this in another thread.) In Cradle it's primarily interested in attacking your units, and secondarily your cities. (Actually it's a bit more complicated than that because David also modified some of the parameters in the definition of GOAL_SEIGE, the goal for attacking cities.)
Locutus tried to go more systematically into the question of which strategies the AI uses when at war during the beta testing of MedMod but I don't know what they came up with, if anything.
If you want to get a grasp on how the AI 'tasks it's units', that is matches units with goals, check out Locutus's post in the 'Conversations with Richard Myers' thread but beware: the details are excruciatingly mentally painful!
WesW asked Richard about this data and got the following reply (luckily, I saved the whole thread on my HD
:This partially contradicts what was said in the documentation you quoted above, so how they affect when "high-level strategic decisions are made like when to go to war", is an open question. (Maybe Richard just forgot about that part.) What he said about how they are used to compute which new proposals an AI should make must certainly be true: I think that what it means is that an AI civ with a high 'FearTradeRank' motivation priority would be more inclined to enter into trade agreements and one with a high 'FearMilitaryRank' motivation priority would be more inclined to enter into military agreements. BTW, as for war, there's a function "INT GetDesireWarWith(int<player>, int<player>)" which returns 1 or 0. It seems to depend initially on the player's personality type but changes according to relative strength.
Basically, I think yes. These are exactly the settings for the Barbs in the original game (David changed them for Cradle) and there they are in kamikaze mode: they attack anything they can.
Well, yes, but I'm not sure how much. To get an AI civ to go all out for a human's cities is easy; in the 'NextStrategicState' event:
Code:
if (IsAtWarWithHuman(player[0])){
ConsiderStrategicState(Player[0], 1500, StrategyDB(STRATEGY_SEIGE),-1,-1,-1);
}where 'IsAtWarWithHuman' is a function that returns 1 when player[0] is at war with a human.
The problem then is to stop it being so aggressive if it's losing. But there's lots of SLIC functions we can use to do this, so that's why I think it's really just a matter of working out what we want to do.
Edit: To fix code. And, can anyone (perhaps a moderator) tell me how to stop messages from expanding horizontally? Thanks.
Martin Gühmann
Chieftain
So I think this will make the AI more agressive. In combination with this stuff it will also attack stronger humans:
Yes Dave really lowered all these force match settings. He did not increased one of these numbers. But he also replaced the Barbarian settings by settings from another strategy. I remeber it vaguely that Dave something mentioned to "civilize" the Barbarians a little bit.
But that could be something for a late game strategy, if the AI bothing to loose left: I would call it STRATEGY_SUICIDE, that means there are two possibilties die or die.
If the human is too strong it lies in his hands when to kill an AI. So the AI should go on war with the human and use everythig that it has to attack the human by using these kamikaze force match setting of zeros.Originally posted by PeteT
WesW asked Richard about this data and got the following reply (luckily, I saved the whole thread on my HD
This partially contradicts what was said in the documentation you quoted above, so how they affect when "high-level strategic decisions are made like when to go to war", is an open question. (Maybe Richard just forgot about that part.) What he said about how they are used to compute which new proposals an AI should make must certainly be true: I think that what it means is that an AI civ with a high 'FearTradeRank' motivation priority would be more inclined to enter into trade agreements and one with a high 'FearMilitaryRank' motivation priority would be more inclined to enter into military agreements. BTW, as for war, there's a function "INT GetDesireWarWith(int<player>, int<player>)" which returns 1 or 0. It seems to depend initially on the player's personality type but changes according to relative strength.
This is the last problem to make a weaker AI to go on war with the human and make shure that the AI will stay on war with the human. We just have to make shure that the AI won't sign a peace threaty with you, if it disire to go to war with you also if you threaten the AI with war. That was the problem in my last game. I reloaded a game very often and every time the AI took one of my cities. But finally I was able to get a map exchange and a peace treaty. And this AI was still happy with me as long as it was on the map.
So you can say if an AI makes peace with the human it actually commits suicide. But the human has still it in his hands when he will kill the AI.Maybe you could use a smaller font size for codes.
-Martin
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