Slitherine

Hi all,

I can send you a private dropbox link if you want to help me testing the Holland scenario I started making a few weeks ago.
Let me know in the comments or send me a PM in the forums so I can send it to you.
There is hundreds of hours put into the scenario. Not only making it, but doing research, reading, painting, testing and of course beta testing the editor tools and experiment with it. And adding hundreds of unit and citynames of course.

I will be greatful for everyone who wants to try and all feedback is more then welcome. Only Pavel and myself saw it so far.
There are a few parts that are unfinished and I show them in the TO DO list at the end of this document.

I would really like to hear feedback on the following parts myself:

- Graphics overall. Terrain, banners and added icons etc.

! Setting the saturation slider ingame to 110% gives a more colorfull image if you think it's to "grey" !

- Performance. Can you really play the game, make a lot of turns mid/end game and does it crash?

- Do you experience issues that are not in the main game?

- Do the right tribe portraits, icons, unit and citynames pop up?

Of course if you want to provide feedback about map setup and balancing it is very welcome as well, but please note that I was not able to fine tune this part yet.
Also the techs and units assigned per tribe and the resources amount are just for testing. It's all in the to do list.

TO DO

- Assigning specific units per tribe
- Fine tune starting resources and techs per tribe
- fine tuning diplomatic standings between tribes

Thank you for your help with testing and enjoy!

INSTRUCTIONS:

FIRST MAKE A BACKUP OF YOUR ORIGINAL ANCIENT ROME MOD FOLDER!!!

- Download the dropbox file.
- Unzip the dropbox rar file.

- Copy the whole Hollandv0.63 folder in your own scenario folder.

C:\Users\YOURNAME\Documents\My Games\Aggressors Ancient Rome\Scenarios

- Now duplicate you Ancient Rome mod.

D:\Program Files (x86)\Kubat Software\Aggressors Ancient Rome\Bin\Mods\ancient_rome

You now have two ancient_rome mods.

- Rename the duplicate to holland (no capitol).

- Go into the newly named holland folder and delete the ancient_rome .ag file

- Copy the contents of the holland mod you just unzipped into the new holland folder in your Aggressors mod folder. OVERWRITE everything if prompted.

- Start the game normally and select MOD. Select holland mod and wait a few seconds so it's loaded. You can see the right corner of the screen name change.

- Now QUIT Agressors. And start Agressors again. Otherwise it will not work. Aggressors will now start with the holland mod.
(In v4 you have to do this when you change back to Rome mod as well).

- Select new game (NOT load game) and play.

Sorry for the hazzle. It will be all more easy in the future.
Thank you for your time.

*PLEASE NOTE that also the MOD/Scenario is under NDA*

I also put a list here with all terrain changes. It's never just a single change what makes the map looks different.
There is a lot of work involved since all objects also have to fit all textures etc.

Here a list to keep track on all changes I made so far. Just to show there is no magic button to change the graphics with a simple tweak.

- Made the plains a bit darker. Change hue levels.
- Made the grass a bit lighter and less green. Less saturated. Change hue levels. (specially roads are better visible now)
- Antialiased the trees and made them darker.
- Add orange and brown small trees (for diversity and less repetetiveness).
- Smoothed all coast and border edges.
- Smoothed the mountains and make the colors more inline with the enviroment (this was specially for the Holland scenario since we do not have real mountains here).
- Added a more detailed object selector.
- Made the stone mine lighter.
- Reversed grass and plain color in terrain overlay (simple line in ag file) to make grass light green and plains dark green as in the map itself. It was reversed that was confusing.
- Added small real grass in green, light green and grey
- Change the goldmine from yellow to gold
- Made the coal and iron mine darker (distinct better from terrain)
- Made the watchtower brighter
- Made the wood in the fort brighter and less colorfull and the stones darker so there is an artificial lightening effect.
- Made the rivers more in color of the sea, so much darker.
- Reworked the whole scrub texture and sand texture to give them more detail
- Removed fade edges from borders and made them much smaller
- Added shells on coastlines
- Added cows
- Lowered amount of fooliage on grass and plain tiles significant (almost 50%)
- Added some darker forest trees (more diversity in groups)

I'd be glad to test it. Please send the link.

gwgardner wrote:I'd be glad to test it. Please send the link.

Thank you and done in PM

gwgardner wrote:I'd be glad to test it. Please send the link.

Enjoy Gary. It is a great work. I am curious how will you like the scenario and the terrain textures as well.
Please write your feedback here

Installed. Started as Romans. I'll ignore the starting research level, as you said that isn't fine-tuned yet.

Great look. A brighter look than standard, and maybe less busy. Whether better than standard, or just different, too early to say. As you are probably aware from my lack of comments on graphics, I'm no judge of all that, so would comment on it negatively only if I see something weird.

Concering setup, when clicking on some countries to select at the very start, I note that some show one colored province, some multiple colored provinces. Not sure if that is by design yet.

On the Roman province map, all the land and rivers are visible, except a two-tile blacked out area in the middle of a river, near the middle of the province.

Now I'll start playing, with the assumption in this iteration that it's the Rome province of Holland in a time of crisis, when possibly one or more of the tribes in Holland are rising up against Roman domination.

I'll amend my graphics comment by saying that it is immediately clearer what the terrain types are from both the 2d and 3d views.

I like the look from about saturation 100 to 200. Looks good in all that range.

[later]

I switched to the Rome mod, loaded a Rome game and I can still tell the different terrain types easily, with the possible exception of forest, which is sometimes on a gray based tile and sometimes more green base. The Rome mod terrain is indeed a tad bit busier.

The difference is not so very striking other than the busy factor.

By the way, I'm thinking that the 'busy' factor is related to how many trees there are. So I'll go test the Rome mod terrain with less trees.

[later again]

Tried low trees in the graphics settings, and like that better, less busy on the Rome mod terrain. That's the way I'll play from now on.

When switching between mods, I noted that the game froze on startup when I was using the Rome mod, and tried to start a Holland game. You probably expected that. Or maybe not? At any rate, I will in the future keep the two separate.

gwgardner wrote:Concering setup, when clicking on some countries to select at the very start, I note that some show one colored province, some multiple colored provinces. Not sure if that is by design yet.

This is correct if the tribes that are shown are related with each other in some way (brothers in arms or both maps revealed etc).

I understand your view about the terrain. Thank you for your feedback.
My opinion is that I try some things and we can all see if there is something that we all like and Pavel can even make it better.

Less busy is probably since the trees/fooliage on grass and plain tiles are reduced.

Nice spot in the water tiles. I think there was land before, changed it to water and now the player doesn't see the tile. I think I can easily edit this. I will take a look.

Yes, with objectives I like to give more attention to history. But you have to imagine a Roman occuputationm while the land was not easy to use for the Romans as well. Later in 20 AD (If I'm right, but I will check it later) there is an uprising of Germanica and Batavi tribes indeed against Roman occupation. There was also the famous battle of teutoberg forest.
And the Tencteri and Usipetes tribes were eliminated from the map by Romans at a certain time.
The Frisii where needed to protect the North against German invaders and used cowhides to trade with the Romans.

gwgardner wrote:When switching between mods, I noted that the game froze on startup when I was using the Rome mod, and tried to start a Holland game. You probably expected that. Or maybe not? At any rate, I will in the future keep the two separate.

Yes I noted it somewhere in the instructions that you have to restart the Aggressors app before using the new selected mod.
This works for both sides, also to change back. I edit it in the instructions.

I'm very curious how performance is as well after many turns. If you want to skip turns quick and see the AI play you can use Ctrl - Q to reveal the whole map at once.
Even if you do nothing, just skip turns you will survice at least 50 turns and I wonder if any of you got issues then.

Changing the graphic settings is helping a lot to reduce trees. Also using the color overlay helps for that.
Did you notice I changed two colors in the overlay? Grass is now light green in overlay and in map and plains are dark green in overlay and in map. In the original mod grass is light green and the overlay for grass is dark green and the plains are light green in the original overlay. This change helps a lot to have less confusion I think.

The trees I reduced in the AG file itself. You have to imagine that every tile is an island with a different tree pattern, which trees are shown and how many percentage of all this. I reduced almost 50% of grass and a little less on plain tiles.
In the mod thread you can find one of the last posts is a list with all minor changes I made together.

@gardner

Probably you find it out already but the easiest way to try the textures in the rome mod is to simply copy the bitmap file in the high textures map (or low if you use them) and overwrite the original rome one.
(don't forget to back it up first).

Happy to test after I finish my "Hard" difficulty game in a few days.

n0kn0k wrote:Happy to test after I finish my "Hard" difficulty game in a few days.

Thank you! Good luck with your game and let us see the progress

i'm at the coast this weekend, and away from the 29th for a week, so will do as much as i can when i'm back on sunday night the 24th, got net access atm, but only laptop with me

zakblood wrote:i'm at the coast this weekend, and away from the 29th for a week, so will do as much as i can when i'm back on sunday night the 24th, got net access atm, but only laptop with me

No rush, enjoy your holidays and thank you for trying the scenario. I appreciate your feedback.

With understanding that the scenario is under development, I'll still make comments on what I see needs to be done or where I think it needs improvement.

1) I would think that the Romans, at the very least, and maybe the more advanced tribes, would have a wider knowledge of the geography.

2) I note that I can't change any city specializations from the ubiquitous nomad. So I suppose I won't be able to heal in cities.

3) The Romans have Greek style units - hoplites, as well as Roman style.

4) The Romans start off with some heavy costs, all the forts especially, and many units. But with little production to pay for them. I figure I'll end up having to sell all those forts (if that's possible) or destroy them, in order to stay alive.

gwgardner wrote:With understanding that the scenario is under development, I'll still make comments on what I see needs to be done or where I think it needs improvement.

1) I would think that the Romans, at the very least, and maybe the more advanced tribes, would have a wider knowledge of the geography.

2) I note that I can't change any city specializations from the ubiquitous nomad. So I suppose I won't be able to heal in cities.

3) The Romans have Greek style units - hoplites, as well as Roman style.

4) The Romans start off with some heavy costs, all the forts especially, and many units. But with little production to pay for them. I figure I'll end up having to sell all those forts (if that's possible) or destroy them, in order to stay alive.

Thank you for this very great feedback.

1. Indeed. I even used Roman names for all cities as how they called the other tribes and settlements. They should have better understanding of the surroundings. Except maybe a couple of Germanic tribes in the East.

2. This is part of balancing starting techs and resources. I will give all tribes access to settlers or at least make it easier to research them early ingame.

3. Unit balancing is next part of the TO DO list. Thank you for pointing out that Hoplite unit. I hope after balancing you want to do another test for units. This is something I lack knowledge of.

4. Yes, this is part of balancing. If they start with forts they need to be able to pay for them or make it possible to pay for them in the first few turns. The idea was that the scenario starts a few years before 50 BC while everything is in development. But yeah, now they are too costly.

Again thank you very much, as major issues and CTD's are history for me with the new fix (I had those mouse smoothness problem) I can start the major part of scenario creating. Balancing.

Cablenexus wrote:Yes, this is part of balancing. If they start with forts they need to be able to pay for them or make it possible to pay for them in the first few turns. The idea was that the scenario starts a few years before 50 BC while everything is in development. But yeah, now they are too costly.

Just change the maintenance cost of forst in your mod file. It is costs->movetype=3 (which is basically id for endturn). You can also create maintenance costs at the beginning of the turn - (startturn id is 4). It depends on what purpose your maintenance costs have, but right now most of them are deducted at the end of turn.

An idea for the Romans, re costs: setup up a dummy country, ie Rome itself, offmap, or even on map but not touchable by other countries, and have a permanent trade route/trade setup sending in supplies from Rome. A few stone, a few wood, some gold - enough for bare maintenance of the structures and force that are present in the Roman province. I doubt in real life a Roman province, especially on the outskirts of the empire, would be expected to pay its own way in everything.

Such a trade route would be an excellent target for the enemy tribes.