Who cares what bricks are made from?

[joshofet]

I was just toying with the editor to find out how it works and stumbled on the following. In my trial scenario I wanted the game to run to victory once 500 bricks were produced, but the problem is that the trigger section lets me choose from three type of bricks, made from straw, rushes and reeds respectively. I have no idea where to get straw, but the brickmakers do indeed collect both reeds and rushes (next to clay). They first use the rushes to produce their bricks, then the reeds. It does however seem the total stock doesn't acknowledge the type of brick, as I can't manage to use the resource in a trigger condition.

Of course I could use a workaround by taking bricks as an activation cost for a world site, where people indeed do not care what bricks are made from. :rolleyes:

I'm aware the resource list in the trigger contains lots of items the game does not appear to keep track of at city or world level, but bricks seem to be a quite essential commodity. I would like to see some date wine, cheers! ;)

Is this a known problem and is there a known solution other than what I suggest? Is there a similar problem with food, or is that solved by the fact that next to the individual food items such as wheat and fish(!) the list also contains the generic item "food"?

[Yahya]

Hi joshofet,

If I am not mistaken, there is a trigger in the first tutorial that says, basically:

"If Player 1 Resources Bricks:Reeds >= 1 OR If Player 1 Resources Bricks:Rushes >= 1 THEN Pop up a message".

It seems that it is possible to trigger from the resources of player 1 by checking for either type of brick, and allowing either to meet the condition.

[Azeem]

Two ways to get around this are a World-Level site and the method that Yahya mentioned. :) Be sure to set it as ">=" because the ">" condition does not work. Also, for victory conditions to work, you need to set them in the Goals editor AND in the Triggers editor. There are several bugs, but the editor still IS functional, contrary to what others might say. ;)

There are quite a number of resources listed that are superfluous. Using cheats, it is possible to stock up your bakeries with foraged food. However, foraged foods do not count as "bread" and "prepared food" (which are needed as currency and salaries), even though your bakery oddly enough can process them. "Beer" does occasionally pop up as a resource, though. It is made from Barley resources and it seems to be automatically and furtively produced by citizens privately in their homes. If you delete a house, sometimes you might catch them carrying "beer." :)

[joshofet]

Yahya's workaround unfortunately does not work. The first tutorial mission has two objects defined, a brickworks reeds and a brickworks rushes. They have different attributes, bricks reeds and rushes respectively. They are used in a trigger for a bakery that fires when eiter one exists.

I used a similar construction just to test whether there are bricks, which seems to be the purpose of the trigger in the tutorial, and that works fine. It doesn't seem this can be used to determine the total number of bricks in the city though.

I have tried various city level alternatives, but none seem to work. The world site workaround does function OK.

[Yahya]

Hmm. that's interesting. I haven't grapsed objects as of yet.

Are you saying that the game is checking to see what type of brickmaker exists, and then checks its bricks accordingly?

[joshofet]

I don't understand your question Yahya, from what I do I would say no. The game seems to be checking whether there is a brickmaker with at least one brick of a specific kind, say bricks made of reeds. This is called an object of the type 'brickwork reeds'. Once you have defined that object you have a trigger 'brickwork reeds exists', which can be used in the trigger section. That trigger fires when the first brickmaker produces his first brick from reeds.

Apparently the creators were aware of the bug and used this workaround. I see no way of using it to determine the total number of bricks.

For food it appears possible to use wheat separately, Karter did it in his Tjemhu scenario.

[Yahya]

Is it not possible (I haven't tried) to set this at, say, bricks (reeds) >= 500? Then wouldn't it check to see if we had ... wait, maybe I get it.

You're saying that we can only check what a brickmakers has, not what the city has, correct?

So, basically, we'd have to check and create an object that says brickmakers >= 5, then check the bricks >= 500 (as each brickmaker can hold 100 bricks, IIRC).

I don't have access to the disc now, so I unfortunately can't check that, but I will. That would be good to know.

[joshofet]

It seems possible to check whether there's a brickmaker with 100 reed bricks, but I doubt there will ever be one in the city. I found no way to check the total sum of all bricks in the city, at least not in the editor trigger section. Fortunately at the play level Player1 wil have no difficulty in assessing it ;)

It may be possible to check whether a farmer has been brewing some beer this way, then zoom in on the hut and start a commercial. Wonder if it is possible to have the angry gods punish all citizens performing adultery? :p

[Azeem]

It would be interesting if you could. :D

The "Audultery" event is listed, however, so perhaps you might be able to set that as a condition and then have the effect cause the destruction of certain buildings or demise of certain types of people. Of course, it's indiscriminate, but when in mythology has divine retribution ever been discriminiate? :p