Slitherine

So, I saw in a dream last night I was playing a version of CoW, though more advanced in all ways (perhaps CoW 2? ) that I had control of the hittites (don't know why, but I never liked them which makes it even more strange) and I had a democracy, and a rich country (I was still the king of course...) and my people worshiped the Olympian Gods, and our enemy (not sure who it was) was much more powerful and threatening. Then they (enemy) tricked us somehow and they attacked us in our capital. Our forces fled, and later had to fight on open field. They outnumbered us but we tried our best. I won't go into details about tactics, but it was a gory battle and we lost. Our allies Egyptians promised to help us restore our country, so they came to our help with their army and our few units remaining, to oust the enemy. I don't remember what happened after that, but, it was a great dream, and it gave me some good ideas for a future game :-p

Oh, I also remember a great speech in the capital, of our (me) leader talking about the first aegean democracy etc (yes I know I know...).

When I have time later tonight I will just play some CoW I think.

Must have been something you ate before bedtime. If you figure out what it was, let me know, I wouldn't mind a few dreams like that.

I still like the fact that CoW doesn't limit the size of cities by some arbitrary "brick" number, but I missed the old Legion ability to shift population by building peasants so badly that I had to mod the files. The technology advances in the game happen simultaneously for everyone, which is probably no farther from reality than the "research" in Spartan and GoT, so you don't get a situation where you get so far ahead in tech level that the the game gets absurd, and you are fielding elite hoplites against rampaging hordes of untrained militia. Overall, I still find the CoW basic strategic game more to my liking than Spartan/GoT, although those do have a more refined combat engine and the diplomatic system which CoW badly needs. I still play Spartan on occasion, but CoW sits right next to my PC for easy (and frequent) access.

Dear Honvedseg,

How can I introduce the population migration feature into COW? I also feel more comfortable with it and really miss it in COW. Please let me know what files I have to modify.

Thanks,

Aurelian

The squads.txt file includes an entry for each unit something like USES_POPULATION = 0, or thereabouts, which needs to be changed to a 1 for the peasant unit. Changing all military units would cause each one to use a unit of population to build, which could be recovered by disbanding.

Thanks a lot Honvedseg ,

I really liked this feature. It makes the game more realistic since you have to manage your population as well. Without it you and your AI foes are able to recruit from cities without any limits.

Requiring a unit of population to build any military unit increases the value of an herbalist or doctor, which is almost useless in the game otherwise.

You can still move excess population from your nearby cities to one with a barracks, splitting the burden and increasing the available manpower. Also, the first few population units are much smaller in terms of actual population numbers than the later ones, so you can actually replenish used population units faster when you've all but emptied the town. The AI will do this regularly, as it doesn't handle the change very well. I was in favor of a more linear approach to population per military unit, but that didn't happen, so a densely packed city takes longer to regrow a population unit than one with only a handful of residents.

Will the AI freak out if I mod all units to cost 1 population? I mean, if I do this, will the AI be able to handle it and adapt to it? Or will it just drain its cities and run out of pops?

The AI has no concept of this so it will be ok to start but probably fall apart when it runs out of population. You might need to taise teh growth rates to compensate.

The AI will initially do some stupid things, lowering its population to minimal levels (although not to 0), but seems to eventually recover. I find that making the peasants cost 1 population unit works fairly well after the AI gets over the first building spree, but making all military units do so seems to hamstring the AI, and results in a walk-over.

honvedseg wrote:The AI will initially do some stupid things, lowering its population to minimal levels (although not to 0), but seems to eventually recover. I find that making the peasants cost 1 population unit works fairly well after the AI gets over the first building spree, but making all military units do so seems to hamstring the AI, and results in a walk-over.

Okay, maybe I'll just do the peasants to start with, and maybe the Khepetj Auxilia, too. How do I do that, though? I couldn't find anything in the squads.txt file. I just used the Spartan command for it "usesworker" or something like that. But it didn't work. Nothing costs 1 population. How do I tell it to make units cost 1 population?

In the squads.txt file, there is a line for each unit type which says something like "usespopulationunit=0". Change the 0 to a 1 with notepad or any other pure text editor that can save the file as a .txt file, without adding all sorts of font and header stuff. I recommend making a backup copy of the file, so you don't have to re-install the whole game if you mess something up.

honvedseg wrote:In the squads.txt file, there is a line for each unit type which says something like "usespopulationunit=0". Change the 0 to a 1 with notepad or any other pure text editor that can save the file as a .txt file, without adding all sorts of font and header stuff. I recommend making a backup copy of the file, so you don't have to re-install the whole game if you mess something up.

Really? I didn't see that in the file. I'll have to look again.