Sitting on the fence

[Gandalf Parker]

I like that idea. It also would make the game abit more RPG since you would get very protective about early era champions that have made it thru the ages. And on a really large map that would breath new life into the game as it progresses thru the eras. I even think that this might be a good thing for Illwinter to look into. Adding a progressive game option.

I had an idea to do a big campaign scenario with 3 maps and try go with the feel of moving from era to era with carryover benefits but I could only simulate it. I couldnt really base the growth on previous actions. I really like the concept with a mod moving it along. You might actually have found my motivation to mod.

[Gandalf Parker]

I found an old "half an idea" writeup.

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Ive been leary of mentioning the "change game on the fly" since it adds to the concenr of trusting your host. Its a problem that we had in Dom2. Also, I suspect that use of it, might cause Johan to fix it (Ive personally had problems along that line )

However, it does hold some wonderful possibilities.
Here are some tidbits for you:

A) it is possible for an external program to programmically make changes to the mod during the game. For best results the game should be brought down and rebooted after the change is made.

B) it is possible for an external program to "see" and react to:
1) what turn it is
2) what season it is
3) certain nations failing to upload turn files, or failing to upload a turn for X number of hostings
4) how many nations have dropped out
5) how many are owned by a nation or by all nations:
1a) provinces
2a) forts
3a) income
4a) gem income
5a) research
6a) dominion
7a) army size
8a) victory points
6) all of the above as it applies to Independents to gauge the progression of the game. Such as when there are less than 10% provinces held by indepts.
7) largest change in any of the above
8) how many of something has entered the game:
1b) assassins
2b) horrors
3b) global spells
9) certain specific provinces being attacked (when the home of xxxx is attacked then)
10) certain spells being cast (meaning a way to check if a certain research level has been reached, or to know that AI Ermor is now capable of xxxxx)
11) what random events have run
12) specific items gotten from combats
13) overkills (such as a 2000 army killing a 200 army)
14) more than one nation playing with the same serial (one person playing as two and

Such as....
a game with a better planned Early Age Ermor as an AI. Well designed god, well chosen scales, tweaked to play well as an AI. And then an outside program can watch the logs. When Ermors castle comes under siege then "Ermor casts a massive revenge spell" and suddely goes total undead with tweaks to be a big problem trying to take them out.

Or a "sacred forest" stretching across numerous provinces and when they are attacked then Pangaea erupts everywhere.

[Lazy_Perfectionist]

Glad to know I've helped to motivate you just as someone helped motivate me to finish my Golem Cult guide. I'd be willing to help you with such a mod, as long as someone knowledgeable was in a leadership role.

I'm not yet willing to decipher the inner working of the mod files and save game formats, though coding a small program in Python or C++ to adjust what I'm told, would be within my field of interest.

And if some grunt work needed doing, I'd be willing to adjust everything needing change, as long as someone else did the thinking for me. "Here's this information, it looks like this, change all 100 of these values. Here's how you open it." I'm willing to do that, I've got the downtime with my job. "Here's what I want to do, how do I do it, where do I do it, and what is it called?" That requires brain cycles used by my job and guide write up- at the moment, that's tapped out. Though that will change for the better.

[Gandalf Parker]

Gee that would work well for me.
I have an over-active brain and extremely-lazy fingers.

[Gandalf Parker]

Idea for the next mega-game. If anyone has been watching it they know that much of the games "diplomacy" has been based on the score graphs. Any game on a large map (20/player) and around 10 players or more has seen it. And I have taken note of the requests for games with scoring turned off.

So Im thinking.. run the game --noscoregraphs --scoreboard which kills the graphs IN the game but gives exact numbers to a file that the host can post.

But dont post it. Take the scores.html and process it to give "worlds general impression of" which you post instead. Keep a running total of the numbers and offer the average results by only listing the highest and lowest nation. "The worlds general impression is that Ermor has the largest armies, Arcos has the most magic, Caelum has the most resources". Since its a running average, sudden spikes or losses might not show up. The world would have to gradually get an idea of changes. You might know that generally the worlds impression is that Jotunheim has the smallest army even though sudden losses make Ctis the actual lowest in military forces. Hmmm over long-game that will get less and less useful. Maybe the running total should only reflect the last... 10 turns? year? And OBVIOUSLY Im thinking of automating the process.

It would make spying more useful, trading info more profitable, and make bluffing a real part of the game.
OK yeah, its an RPG thing and the ladder people will probably hate it but then they tend to hate the mega games anyway.

[llamabeast]

I like that idea. It could be a running average with noise. As in, each turn the "army" value for a nation is its true size +=30%, adn the value shown is the average over the values for the last 10 turns. But the noise could be a parameter chosen at the start of the game, offering some kind of continuum between scoregraphs on and off.

I could do this easily if I had any idea how to automatically draw graphs (my knowledge of automated web and graphics stuff is pretty thin). I think at some point a while ago lch said he had some kind of a php script or something for doing it. That would be great.

[Gandalf Parker]

I was going for text rather than a graph. But it could be automatically graphed. Unix/Linux loves such things. There is a script language called ghost, or an old program called gnuplot. Some require more friendly familiarity with math than I have.
http://linuxgazette.net/103/okopnik.html
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Categor...tting_software