SaveGam2.html

[I like Serena]

I consider Marcus a substitute for Shuri, whose main contribution is a move 2X pathfinder. Shuri is mostly better because you can get her earlier in the game.
And yes, Serena is a nice move X shaman, who can also cast spells (incl. healing), and in particular she has a chance on arcane power.
If she has arcane, she becomes an end-game hero.
Same for Aureus - with arcane he becomes useful, otherwise he isn't.

[Anthony]

I consider Marcus a substitute for Shuri, whose main contribution is a move 2X pathfinder.

Blademaster makes her significantly stronger as an archer -- at level 4 she's Melee 8, Ranged 7, to hit +3, average 4.8/4.2, whereas Marcus is Melee 13, Ranged 8, to hit +1, average 5.2/3.2. Also, she's got a random, and either Lucky or Armsmaster makes her an end-game hero.

[JimBalcomb]

This thread is tracking the status of the SaveGam2.html file that contains the format of a save game.

Hello, ILSe.
I've been using MoM for an analytics practice project, and your/John's/Tim's save game format work has been invaluable.
Thank you!

I am, however, a bit stuck at this point. Do you happen to know how to break down the bitset for the connected cities?
I cannot seem to get the bits to line up with the cities that should be connected.

I'm running 1.3 and working in VBscript. I've converted the binary file to hex and am looping through to grab each chunk of city data
and then looping to grab each field. Everything looks to be lining up right and the values are correct, otherwise.
For the connected cities bitset, I'm converting each hex digit to binary and concatenating them together.

This is what I got after exrtacting, converting, and concatenating the data for City#1:
10011000000000000000110010110101111111110000110111111111000100010000001000000000000000000000000000000000
This is what I got from manually matching City#1 to the City#s to which it has roads:
10011000000000000011000010101101111111111011000011111111100010000100000000000000000000000000000000000000
I've been trying different offsets for the bits and digits, but nothing has made sense of it as yet.

Thank you in advance!
I'll be sharing all my work with the community as soon as I have something basically functional.
https://www.dropbox.com/sh/bfeuk2vbaieoj...Model?dl=0
PS. I'm pretty new to working with binary files, hex, field mapping, bitsets, etc.

[I like Serena]

Hi JimBalComb,

The city connection bits are pretty straight forward. No offsets required.
The city number of each city is simply an index in the set of bits.
When a city is directly or indirectly connected (on the same plane), the corresponding bit is set.
The very first byte corresponds to cities 0-7 as expected.
Of course as usual these bytes have their most significant bit first.

[JimBalcomb]

Hi JimBalComb,

The city connection bits are pretty straight forward. No offsets required.
The city number of each city is simply an index in the set of bits.
When a city is directly or indirectly connected (on the same plane), the corresponding bit is set.
The very first byte corresponds to cities 0-7 as expected.
Of course as usual these bytes have their most significant bit first.

Thanks, ILse. Knowing that helped narrow the field.
And, I did just get it working!

I don't understand the MSB/LSB (Big/Little-Endian?) as yet but it seems to have been a factor.
I had to convert from Hex to Bin per digit, instead of per byte, and then switch them. (e.g. (8)(9) instead of (98))
I also had to left pad the bits instead of right (e.g. Left(intRemain&"0000",4) instead of Right("0000"&intRemain,4))
Then I had to walk back through and reverse the string 8 bits at a time. (e.g. Mid(strBinary, intRevOff, 8))

So, I seem to have all of the fields parsed and converted.
Now, it's on to populating an 89*100 array for all the fields for all the cities.
And, then exporting to a CSV file.
I'm pretty jazzed about being near the point where I can actually start applying the formulas and building a model.

Thanks, again, ILSe! If there's any way I can pay you back, just let me know.

PS. If you'd be interested in adding an end-of-turn data dump to the RTGT, that would be awesome.

[Eljay]

I've been using MoM for an analytics practice project, and your/John's/Tim's save game format work has been invaluable.

Hi Jim,

Nice sleuthing!

Sincerely,
Eljay
( Yes, THAT Eljay :-) )

[I like Serena]

I've been using MoM for an analytics practice project, and your/John's/Tim's save game format work has been invaluable.

Hi Jim,

Nice sleuthing!

Sincerely,
Eljay
( Yes, THAT Eljay :-) )

Hey Eljay!

Nice to see you're back and still interested in MoM.
To be honest... I'm still hoping you'll come up with some new insights in it.
What are you doing with MoM nowadays?

[Eljay]

What are you doing with MoM nowadays?

At the moment, I just play it (1.4n) once in a while. Decompressing a bit, between jobs. And playing WoW a little during the pre-xpac doldrums, while waiting for WoD to drop.

Ironically*, I'll be unemployed on Nov 17th, as part of the 18,000 lay-off at Microsoft. (If you use Expression Blend for XAML, and like it... you're welcome! If you used Expression Blend for XAML and didn't like it, my apologies. If you use the F12 tools in IE, and like them... you're welcome! If you didn't like them... well, I won't be working on them anymore.)

* Well, feels ironic to me. And I do think that Satya Nadella is doing a good job, despite how I was personally impacted. No hard feelings.

Which is why I'm coming up to speed with Swift for OS X & iOS. I'd like to do something new and fresh.

My friend Mike, who worked (past tense) at Turbine for a long time, knows Ken Burd and also The Fat Man. But that did not help my quest to find the source code.

So my hopes of doing a Macintosh port back in 1998, after securing permission with Microprose (who was unable to locate the source code... /sigh), has come to naught. I think the only hope is for an inspired-by MoM new game.

Aside: for those who played MoO on the Macintosh, that was ported by Take 2. I thought they had done a very credible job with that port.

Another aside: I am not sure who was involved in the Japanese port of MoM to Win/J. That would also be an interesting backstory.

Sincerely,
Eljay