Conquest Technical Gripes

[FriedrichPsitalon]

If you have any TECHNICAL problems with Civ - like the 6+ player lag/glitch, like the "Small map with 8 players gets bumped to standard" glitch, please post them here. I'll do the best I can to get the attention of the powers that be on any issue you post here.

Please do NOT post "I don't like the new jag" or "The Enkidu Warrior sux0rs!" or something like that. DESIGN issues are for another thread.

Again, no promises, but if we can collect the info, it'll help with the first patch.

[FriedrichPsitalon]

Reminder: This thread is intended for technical problems, not commentary. No offense guys, but if we're going to ask questions and/or complain (and I respect the need to do that) please do it elsewhere.

I got a response back about the issues so far:

We ended up having to lock the # of players for
Tiny Maps (4) & Small Maps (6). The map
generator was having problems and intermittently
would start players in the same location. This
caused a 1st turn OOS.

Don't shoot the messenger please. I didn't know about this either. Must've happened post-beta.

Modem players w/ broadband will have
lag because the game has to synch up so much
that it bogs things down.

Well, it DOES say broadband reccomended. Welcome to the future of gaming, guys.

As for the timer, we are going to be providing
an update down the road that gives players
control over how fast the game is. I'm going to
try to do this for the content download.

Please note that there isn't a specified "when" for that so don't use it as a club at some future date. That's good news though, I'd say.

[COBRA]

Ok i have some complaints and problems that i hoe can get some attetion.

1st of all is the 8 player thing that we already discussed FP. I even tried to go into the map generator and make a the MPTourney.biq adjusted (from Swissy) so that it would accept 8 players on the small map. To no avail. Still wanted to switch back to standard every time.

2nd not a big deal right now since it is new and still have other parts of the game to adventure in, but we have no futre start era. You can use the ptw futre start but you get stuck with PTW civs. No new civs are allowed in it. So if they have this scenerio or can make on for us that would be nice.

3rd I understand the future of gaiming is cable, but what concerns me is that i have some friends that have more bandwidth with dsl then most do with cable and the game still won't play as it should. For the most part most of the PTW glitches have been removed but now new one's are coming Cable is not always available in all areas. So can the game not accomodate players with dsl and cable combined?

I know that i had others that i wanted to mention but unfortunately it is late and i am unable to remember them. I will post more about others when i think of them. I understand your the messenger and we would never think of shooting you Thanks for your help and concerns.
Cob

[FriedrichPsitalon]

Cobra - I've created each of the scenario starts; as soon as I can find somewhere to upload them, you'll be back in biz. They're precisely the same as the PTW starts with one change - the Conquests Future Start scenario I created does not reveal the map on turn one due to the discover of the Satellite tech. That would change the game JUST a bit (people would take a look at the map and just quit), as well as making Spain even more dangerous than they already are.

Since you can get the scenarios by joining someone who is hosting with them, I'll also try and hang out in the Conquests lobby and spread it around so that others can spread it, etc. Sort of like a Friedrich-disease.

[CanuckSoldier]

Maybe SPM can host them on his myleague account and link them in here.

CS

[FriedrichPsitalon]

Just gave them to Maxfin, so maybe we can have multiple sources for them.

[Maxfin]

You can download scenarios from this link:

www.ee.oulu.fi/~max/Conquests/FriedsModernStart.ZIP

Just unzip them to scenario folder

[Trayk]

FriedrichPsitalon said:

Sort of like a Friedrich-disease.

Does Penicillin cure that?

[COBRA]

I appreciate the quick responce to gettin the scenerio's out. That helps alot. Like i said i have some adventuring to do else where at themoment but that will be nice to have around when i want to expand to the next level.

Now is the connection thing goin to always be a problem with 8 people. Also is there goin to be a way that we can manipualte the maps so as we can have 8 on small. Like i previously stated the swiss fix did not work and wasn't sure what we could do about that. I know that i did it right because Swiss was the one that talked me through it.

Is there some way that we can over ride the protocal that they have set for each individual map size. If so please let me know.
Thanks for all your help
Cob

[Swissy]

One thing I noticed when I tried to fix the 8 player on a MP small map problem. There is an unacceptable number of land masses on the pangea setting. Just played a 8 player std 80% and five players were on a medium sized continent, two were on small (6 city) island that were contected to the mainland by boat, and the last player had a 6 city island unreachable until ocean travel allowed. We cannot hope to have fair 8 player games if these types of maps continue to regularly show up.

[zerza]

That was almost the same scenario I have just encountered,, 2 players were alone on a super continent,, and the other 5 of us were on a continent only slightly bigger then the 2 player continent.

I had room to logicly build 3 cities,,, had to do some killing to get more room... And that just goes against my builders personality And this was on a std 80%!

[FriedrichPsitalon]

As before, I've forwarded these concerns on.

[FriedrichPsitalon]

Got this reccomendation back:

Try playing the 8 player games under:

70 percent water
pangea
5 million years
(other conditions free to change)

I tested this a good bit (and then against an 80 water to compare) and I was surprised to discover that the 70 percent water/5million DOES in fact have NOTICEABLY less island starts. There are some - 4 in 30 starts, only 1 of which was unreachable without suicide galleys (!!) - but they are vastly reduced.

I'm just speculating here, really don't know - but I'd guess that the slightly larger land mass gives the map generator more room to place players on the pangea (remember, minimum start distance may be what is pushing players onto the islands) and I'm guessing the 5 million smooths out the terrain (which is what it's supposed to do) but that this also applies to coast/sea/ocean/land - as in, your land will tend to be more clumped together, producing less island starts.

Anyhow, that's the semi-official word I got back, and I have to say it does look like it improves the problem quite a bit - the 80% water starts were getting noticeably more islands than the 70-and-5-million.

[FriedrichPsitalon]

Anyone else getting this one? Hard lockup in first dozen turns or so, when you reload, the first save is a corrupt file, one turn back produces a black map (no units/cities/land) and an error message, third back works.

[CanuckSoldier]

I don't know about that one Fried, but during my Epic game last night we discovered that loading the last save after a OOS causes the "host cancelled game" message. You have to load TWO turns back and it works fine. I talked to a certain Canadian BA employee about this and he told me that Firaxis was working on this and that it may be related to the possibly not every player having saved the game state from the last turn yet.....more to follow.

But on a good note we played a 8 player Epic(with both NA and Euro players) for 5 hours with only 2 OOS's. We couldn't identify the cause of the OOS's yet, as it was an Epic and no one was at war.

CS