building check

[Yahya]

The Impressions game, Pharaoh, which was the predecessor of CotN in many ways, had a rating system you had to hit.

For example:

• Population 1500
• Culture 15
• Prosperity 20
• Monument 9
• Kingdom 40

This was done to give you targets for how to design your city to appease the Pharaoh and move on to the next mission.

I have some notes on how to create a similar system in CotN. If I can get to it, and work it out, I can start making a campaign that uses that rating system, which should provide new challenges to players.

[Jytte]

Well, you can pretty much do all that with triggers.... except the population part (which one can partially check on by checking individual groups if needed).

It has always bothered me that they put in the 'goals' thing in editor. But they run with 'levels' without anybody bothering to explain which level is what, making it useless. So triggers it is.

What I've always wanted, was a way to check on satisfaction. To me a good city is 'all green'. I've actually seen an uploaded 'finished game' that gives you a win screen, but when you then check the city out, half the population is picketing! What kind of win is that? They do have the satisfaction thing in the goals page, but it's pretty useless when you don't know which is which.

[Jytte]

Btw, as far as I can tell, you can't combine 'goals' and 'trigger check', making it double useless really.

[Yahya]

Yeah I'd have to come up with a way to have advisors to give you a status or something.

Might require a mod.

[Jytte]

Now, if you could come up with a mod that would allow you to trigger-change a paint colour (such as grass or cliff) mid game..... you'd be my best friend forever, and I promise to send you a Christmas card each year

[Yahya]

That'd be a neat trick.

I wonder how Minecraft does that? They change several textures in game depending on what biome the player is in.

[Jytte]

Each square on a map has a reference, which is what we (without seeing it) use when marking up an 'area' in editor. We can actually see that when using the grid, we just can't 'use it'. I think that, as opposed to pixels when we draw a picture in some paint-software (or rather like it but on a bigger scale), when we landscape in Editor, a certain value of paint (and each must have a digital value) gets appointed to each square. So it really shouldn't have been hard to let us have the option to trigger 'I want this area to have this paint-value' whenever.

I guess it didn't occur to them, much like it didn't occur to them that we might want to re-skin objects, which is very difficult for us because they used the, very sloppy, method of using the same skin for multiple items. Even then, one would need to be able to use a 'copy of xxx' for re-skins to have much value for us. What are the chances that what I like a building to look like, is the same as what Peter or Paul want? Changing a skin only changes the look, does not add options. Now, having multiple 'copies' of a building for us to play with, would have been much more demanding on the programmers, although they do it in a way with the multiple version of some buildings. We just don't have the option of influencing what they look like.

Part of our 'problems' probably come from so much of this game being a re-use of parts of previous games (so much for unique). Like the colours. Whenever you use the 'cliffy', you end up with red mountains with green grass on top. NOwhere in Egypt do they have red mountains, and even if they did, they sure won't have green grass on top. Much of my time in mapping goes into trying to change the default colours, sigh.

But our biggest problem is that we were never meant to be here, 14 years later, trying to work around all these problems, ***** about the limitations. We were supposed to by the game, play a few times, and then move on to buying the next game. With all its problems though, it still is the most unique and fascinating game I've ever encountered (not that I have much comparison personally). So here we are, a dedicated, albeit rather small, group of people trying to come up with new ways of enjoying the game