Over on badgame.net, we have a secret santa thing every year, and a poster there got as a gift this insane oldschool gaming guide to Civ4. I can say with sure confidence that it's the only thing I've ever seen on this earth that combines the mindset and language of a Process Integration Management Consultant, whatever that is, with the sage wisdom of Malcolm X.

check it out:

Riidi WW Wrote:Probably because I haven't played in a Badgame Civilization 4 Pitboss, Boak helpfully sent me this guide.




And what's this?




It's written by our very own Vilout. Needless to say his expertise in project management should serve him well in the game of civilization.

You will also notice a running theme in this guide, that Quitman doesn't ever use the right word.




This is clearly a description of German Joey.




A sound piece of advice, and a piece of sound advice. Dohoho.




It has a shitload of quotes like this.




It's got charts in the back showing force projections over a period of of forty to sixty turns.




It's got ten 'principals' for winning the game every time, which some of the players in the civ 4 pitboss games would do well to examine.  Wise principles like "Be sure to check at least one city every ten turns" or "Show mercy to the weak" or "Extortion bad, coercion good."







Needless to say I agree that Serfdom and Emancipation are the only Labor civics worth considering and that Hereditary Rule is an extremely marginal wartime civic.




I can think of some people who could use that tip about guarding their flanks and assessing their ability to maintain production.




100% agreed, barbs are RNG casual trash.




"have artillery stationed in your cities to pick away at a big stack" is literally the only specific, concrete piece of advice I've seen from my skim that is even remotely correct.


ANYWAY, if anyone wants to know what Mr. Gregory specifically thinks about some particular aspect of the game, feel free to ask and I'll find it and take a pic.

If I tell you MoM has bugs, you're not going to be surprised.

How to determine if a spell is correct of if behavior is expected, according to game creators?

Let's find the sources we have:
1. The manuals (pdf) we found with the program (if we have the original CD or the GOG version)
2. The help online
3. The strategy guide
4. the reademe.txt file we found with the program

We can also have to deal with different version of the software.

At least were released:
v 1.00
v 1.01
v 1.1
v 1.2
v 1.3
v 1.31

Of course the latest version should be the preferred one, when available, because it overrules the previous ones.

Any other source I've forgotten?

You can see it at the end of this video.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ePdAWl8fJW8

Confirmed to be present in 1.31 as well as CoM.
However, you need to install W122 and W204 to enable the AI to cast it, as there is a bug preventing the AI to cast the spell in most (not all) combats.

What I managed to find out so far :
-Removing the call at $B028C fixes the bug, but messes up the display. It's a call to an EGA display procedure, used everywhere in the game. It can't be the source of the bug, even though it is.
-The above procedure seems to use the memory reserved for battle units, which might be related. However, this data is supposed to be loaded back afterwards. Plenty of other display related stuff does that without problems, even opening the spellbook does.
-There is no crash if the caster is the player, or the player's hero. It only seems to happen if the caster is the AI's hero or the AI itself.
-The crash doesn't seem to happen on turn 1, only on turn 2 (if the attacker is the AI, they don't have a turn one, only the defender has a turn 1), which is weird.
-The crash seems to happen before the effects are drawn or are applied, but after the sound.

Any idea or information is welcome, I'm somewhat stuck.
The greatest problem is I found absolutely no connection between what causes the crash (specifically the AI using the spell) and where it happens (during the call to a display procedure which works perfectly everywhere else.).

There might be some sort of a memory corruption prior to casting the spell, which is responsible for this.
Edit : Auto isn't triggering the bug either if the hero casts the spell on the player's side. Auto does use the same process the AI does so this would rule out the memory corruption coming from there.

I'm out of ideas.

While disabling the call to the graphics procedure does let the battle continue without a crash, it also means nothing appears on screen, not even the "X has cast" message. A quite unacceptable solution, only slightly better than the crash itself, all that damage coming out of nowhere.

While experimenting with Volcanoes I needed a way to check the mana produced by volcanoes.
So I decided to use the allmighty RTGT.

I found an option in every wizard that show the amount of mana generated by volcanoes.
Unfortunately it is not working: it is always zero.

In the attached save game, I have few volcanoes and RTGT shows zero.
If you go to Saradash (in Myrror) you see 4 of them.
If you cast Change Terrain to transform to mountain, the overall powerbase decrease, as it should.
If you cast Raise Volcano the overall powerbase decrease, as it should, but RTGT is still zero.

Attached Files

  SAVE9.zip (Size: 27.93 KB / Downloads: 0)

I also found another location with 3 wild game and 2 coal.

What are the best spots you have found?

The spell in MoM 1.0 manual says:
Raises a volcano, destroying all food and minerals provided by a
target map square (only map squares that do not already have hills,
mountains or nodes may be targets for this spell). Such volcanoes
permanently provide mana (one per turn) to the casting wizard. If
this spell is cast on a city, each building within the city has a 15%
probability of being destroyed. Newly raised volcanoes also have an
enhanced chance of containing special mineral deposits.

The 1.31 patch came with this brief sentence:
"Volcanoes have a 2% chance to revert to mountains each turn (with a 5% chance of providing a mineral vein)."

I'm not going to get to see it until the night of the 22nd, so if anyone posts spoilers outside of a spoiler tag, I reserve the right to go crazy-admin and ban you.

But man, the good reception from critics so far is looking crazy good. Seeing 125 of 129 reviews being positive on Rotten Tomatoes at the moment. Not bad not bad.

I've found traces of this feature in game code.
The corresponding text in the LBX file belongs to "Break Alliance with" and is used for that purpose.
The "War" version of this request is never queued up anywhere, but the target for it is calculated.

I have absolutely no idea if they wanted to add this to the game, or the code is just a leftover from Master of Orion, and they never planned to make it happen.
As far as I can tell in the code, it was supposed to be a simple yes/no, with Yes declaring war on the requested target, and no breaking the alliance with the wizard who asked you to declare the war.

In theory, it might be possible to replace the event text of something unused (like the "stop summoning your dwarf" one) with a proper request of DoW, but how much the rest of the code is functional, that I don't know, at first sight it looks like it can work.

I'm not sure about this feature but I'm leaning to ignore it, simply because it's pretty much punishing the player for making allies. You either go to war with someone you didn't want to, or lose your alliance with the other wizard. Compared to this choice, not forming an Alliance and keeping the Wizard Pact which cannot be lost just because your partner gets into a war somehow is a lot better. The benefits of the alliance don't really make up for the chance of getting dragged into a war with a random wizard, or your ally.
We also do not know if this feature was meant to be in the game. There are other things carried over from MoO in the code that do not belong here, like the unimplemented Final War which doesn't belong to the game for sure. As more than one player can cast the Spell of Mastery at the same time, everyone getting allied against only one of them would not be reasonable. In MoO, only one person was able to revolt against the final council decision, the human player.

One more thing to consider, even AI players are no longer forced to declare war due to their alliances, as that really dumbs down diplomacy a lot, by preventing peace completely (unless it's simultaneously made with every member of the alliance which is pretty much impossible to do, even for the human player, more for the AI). They still do help out allies at a pretty high random chance, but they won't ignore their peace treaties to do that, and it's possible in theory to always roll "not helping" every turn, although as time passes, this will be more and more unlikely.

Anyway, the question is, would you consider an ally asking you to declare war something that makes the game more fun to play, or something that's annoying and better to leave out?

The jump from 1.0 to 1.1 is planned to contain all the fine tuning and balancing of all spells in the game that hasn't been done yet.

The following spells are considered to need further changes :

Move Fortress - This has no business being in Nature and should be Arcane, if at all present in the game.
Awareness - An uninteresting spell that completely eliminates the need of scouting and preventing enemy scouts from finding cities. Also redundant if you have Nature Awareness already. This can be removed to free up a global enchantment slot, and a slot in Arcane magic, the latter can be used by Move Fortress.
Psionic Spark - Not very interesting, and would be better to use this slot for something else, but I don't have any good ideas.
Vertigo - The spell itself is good the way it is, but would be more suitable to be a common, in place of Psionic Spark.
Haste - Far too overpowered effect, doubling the damage output of the target with no drawbacks whatsoever, including counterattack damage. No idea what to do with it, though.
Wall of Darkness - Effect feels more Sorcery than Death, but Sorcery has no need for another anti-ranged spell to go along with Guardian Wind and Mass Invisibility. Moving it to Sorcery would open up a slot in Death for a new spell, though.

That's pretty much all that's left, as you can see there is a chance to add a completely new Nature, Sorcery or Death global enchantment (and at least one Nature or Sorcery spell of any type, if it's not the enchantment), but I don't have any good ideas right now.

Additionally, spell changes I already did and plan to have in 1.1 are :