Lesson Six -- Military Sites and (gasp) Triggers

[CharleyK1]

Man i was wondering, if you have like 2 raider camps and both send raiders, is there anything do do to specify wich of the raiders attack when raiders are invaiding tghe city?

You can specify what "nationality" the raiders are, but as far as I can tell, there's no real difference. As noted in one of the posts earlier in this thread, the direction the raiders approach from is random too, so choosing which nationality makes no difference there for sure. Your triggers can definitely specify which raider camp has "sent" the raiders, but in my experience, there are no clues, visual or otherwise to the player as to which camp sent them - unless you want to add a message TELLING the player where they came from

[Yahya]

Hi Punchackle, and welcome.

What's your native language? I saw your other post that English is not your first language.

To your question, CharleyK1 is right.

When you send raiders, all that happens is that 3 to 5 raiders appear on the map from a random entry point and come raid the homes.

There are some things you can do, however.

First, if you want extra raiders, you have to fire a spawn raider trigger effect many times. If you run one of those 5 times, you will get 5 X 3 to 5 raiders, for a total of 15 to 25 raiders on the map at one time. However, they will appear in groups of 3 to 5, so they could come from 5 different locations.

Second, you can make certain areas of the map border impassable to land units (i.e., raiders, citizens, et cetera). To do that, you can add cliffs and deep water, as walking units cannot cross those. However, you must leave at least one space, a minimum of about 4 squares wide, or no raiders or land traders can come to the nome. By placing only one or two of these narrow entry points, you can control which direction the raiders come from. However, it also makes it pretty easy for the player to plan around those invasions.

You can also specify the nationality of the raiders by selecting the type such as Raiders Egyptian, Raider Greek, and so on. You can use that to indicate the source of the raiders by having two cities of different nationality.

Lastly, you can get fancy. When you make a world level site, you can specify whether it spawns raiders by selecting a checkbox on its creation screen. If that box is checked, it shows a little icon that indicates to the player that raiders come from there.

You could always make two copies of that site, one with spawn raiders unchecked, and one with it checked. To indicate to the player the source of the raiders, you could alternate between the two sites, so when the player views the world map, it is clear which one sent the raiders. That will take a bit of coding, but it wouldn't be that hard.

I'm sure that we can all come up with other ideas as well, if we think about it.

[tomnobles]

There is a time delay on the trigger.

[Karsite]

Hopefully a few people still lurk here...

I can't seem to get any raiders to actually raid me, which kind of defeats the object of having a fortress that comes with warnings about being invaded until you go insane. I've set up the triggers as per the instructions, and double-checked everything, but after 10+ years of game time... no invaders.

The only thing I can think is that the raider camps are set to be invisible, since they're not supposed to be disabled, ever, no matter how badass the fortress winds up being. They're checked as active though, so I can't see that making a difference.

The Old Fortress

File is there, if anyone feels like checking it over and telling me what I'm missing.

[Yahya]

Hi, Karsite!

I will have a look now and see what I can find.

[Yahya]

Er, no I won't. The download permission is denied.

I will re-post my old Scenario Editor's Manual (I've been lazily avoiding doing so), and review the section on raiders at the same time.

There is a rather meticulous procedure that must be followed to get raiders to attack, and I'm sure you're just missing one step. I will let you know shortly.

[Yahya]

Karsite,

After reviewing the Scenario Editor's Manual (which I relinked in the stickied post), and thinking about raiders a bit, I remembered a few things.

First, when you make a site on the World Map, you can select the checkbox "Spawns Raiders" for that site. That performs no function for the game, other than providing a graphic on the map that indicates to the player that the raiders are coming from that city.

It is therefore possible to send raiders from any city you want, because the World Map plays no role in determining this. So sending raiders from hidden sites should be possible.

To spawn raiders, you merely need a functioning trigger, with at least one valid Condition (which can be evaluated as TRUE), and at least one Event (which must be of the type Raiders_X, where 'X' is the type of raider, e.g. Greek).

So without seeing your scenario (I'll be happy to look at it if I can download it), I think there must be a problem with your trigger.

The simplest trigger would be something like this:

IF Condition (Player looks at me funny) THEN Event (Raiders_Greek).
This will spawn 4 to 5 raiders from a random map entry point and they will come in and wreak havoc, as much as 5 raiders can, anyway.

To have a larger group of raiders, you need more than one Event in the trigger. Many of us give, say, 4 Event objects, such as:

Raiders_Greek AND Raiders_Greek AND Raiders_Greek AND Raiders_Greek.This will produce something like 16-20 raiders, which is a little more problematic. With enough raiders stealing enough goods, you can create significant dissatisfaction in a city.

There are a number of ways to make this trigger fail to fire.

The first, and simplest, is to have the trigger set to OFF. This will mean the trigger will never fire, and raiders will never spawn, unless another trigger first sets the raiders trigger to ON. Many of us have mistakenly clicked that checkbox and wrecked our triggers before, so check that.

The second would be to put in some Condition that cannot be met, like requiring the player to open one of the hidden World Map sites, which would be impossible, of course.

These are just a few ideas to check.

Let me know what you find.

[Karsite]

I worked directly from the manual (at least, I'm pretty sure I interpreted it right) which is why I'm confused. I can really only think that the camps not being visible might be the issue, which if that's the case... kind of defeats the whole object, since I want the place to be constantly under attack, even if you manage to murder everyone on the map. It's supposed to be one that drives people insane.

[Yahya]

Okay, I have the file now. I'll have a look and let you know what I find.

[Yahya]

Okay, I found the problem. The condition you have is that for each Raiders event, the associated Raiders site must be open. However, the sites are invisible, so the player cannot open them, and therefore the conditions can never be true.

The workaround for this is for you to use triggers to open those sites. You therefore need events of type World Site set to open each raider site.

You then need a trigger set to trigger each World Map site open event at some predetermined time.

Once the triggers open each world site, after the predetermined time interval (you've set a delay of several game seconds for each condition) the raiders events will fire.

That's the hangup there.

[Karsite]

So, they can't be invisible and active at the same time? That... really sucks. Have to get creative and see if I can hide them on the map somehow.

[Yahya]

Oh, yes. They can be active and invisible. (We all have done that to players all the time. ) But unless you use a trigger (or triggers) to set them to active, the World Site Is Open condition can never be true.

All you have to do is make a trigger that sets each of those world sites to open. The event should be World Level type, and the action should be Open, site should be Raiders1, Raiders2, etc.

Then you just have that fire at some point, maybe even from the start of the scenario, and the raiders will start spawning.

[Karsite]

Oh, now that actually makes it more fun. All five of them now fire at different times, either when prestige hits a certain level, various buildings are built or when other world sites are open. Will make testing extra insane-making, since I already can't remember which buildings and world sites trigger the raids.

[Yahya]

LOL. Cool.

I'm glad it worked out for you. Now you know how to cause some trouble for the players.