|
|
New Castle (Snake and wolf)
|
Author |
File Description |
LordPsycom |
Posted on 05/05/13 @ 06:35 AM
My first try to make a new and strong castle for computer players. First I tried to make the defensive wolf more powerfull, then tried to make the Snake stronger. Please comment, that will help me to improve my work.
Castle 1: (snake)
--> 4 Big Towers
--> Water
--> Good economy
--> One big center
Castle 2: (wolf)
--> One center, protected by less defended areas( for economy)
--> my first try, don't be angry with me. |
Author | Comments & Reviews ( All | Comments Only | Reviews Only ) |
---|
Heroesflorian |
Posted on 05/13/13 @ 04:33 PM
I suggest you to add screenshots of each castle to the description here (or at least links to the pictures).
Now, here "a few" hints:
General hints:
- The ai won't build more than 10 dog cages.
- For siege engines (mangonels, ballistae, fire ballistae, trebuchets), only spots 1-3 are used ingame (spots 4 and 5 will be ignored).
- The troops spots labelled "HBW" (probably Horse-BoW) are for horse-archers. So never place these onto towers...
- The first troop spot for "oil" engineers is rarely to never actually used ingame.
- When building stairs, you have to "draw" from the place where the top-most stair should be, to the tile where the lowest stair should be, and then move the cursor 1 tile FURTHER onto an (empty) tile. Otherwise, the stair gets buggy, with 2 parts of the stairs being built/shown as 1 building step. This results in only 1 of these two tiles being built at all in the game, making the stairs useless.
- For some building counts / numbers, the default aiv castles can be a good reference.
Snake castle: It finally features walls and moat on all sides, and quite a bit weapon production.
- The trading post is very far away from the keep location, which makes it quite likely that on many maps without that much space it won't be built due to landscape features (rivers, mountains, ...). So, consider moving it a bit closer to the keep.
- Try to avoid putting down only very little pieces of wall (e.g. just 1 or 2 tiles) of a wall too often, as every step needs the same amount of time, slowing down the process if there are many small steps for 1 wall.
- Try to place some moat early on, as it doesn't cost anything and it takes some time to get finished by the digging troops.
- Having three wells is a good idea. Though, it would be even better if they were spread out between the other buildings instead of being placed all in the same corner far away from most of the burn-able buildings.
- Snake will never ever recruit any crossbow-men. Thus, placing x-bow-spots in the aiv file is completely useless (unless you want to use the castle on a map where some crossbow-men of that player have been pre-placed in the map editor before - but that is quite unlikely and using that argument you could just use any troop spot in the aiv file...).
- Your castle gets enclosed at step 120 although at step 45, the necessary walls are already placed, as you left out the corner tiles there. Instead of enclosing the castle, you put down 5 rows of walls before (all without corner tiles). This is very expensive (especially if you are the Snake and have a weak economy). So, please try to fix that. Moreover, you place all of the buildings inside the castle before you set up any walls at all.
- For the high amount of weapon workshops (10 fletchers and 7 poleturners) and the "outside" population (apple orchards, quarries, ...), 6 houses might be a bit too few.
- You use low wall in front of high wall. I have asked myself, why - and the most likely answer probably is that you want to prevent assassins or siege towers conquering the main (high) walls. Though, by offering low wall with access to all gatehouses, you actually make it even easier (lower wall = faster to climb) to conquer the gatehouses. I suggest to add 1 or 2 tiles of high crenellated walls to the sides of the gatehouses where the low walls touch it. This makes the gatehouse inaccessible from the low walls. Moreover, at the four big corner towers, you put no no low wall, providing another 4 "access" points for assassins and siege towers. Adding another wall of either high or low crenellated walls would make them unclimbable.
Wolf castle: This looks quite impressive and... well, awesome! :) The idea/concept is quite creative: Instead of having 1 castle, there are actually 1 main castle part in the center which is surrounded by 6 more or less separated, small castles. This design is definitely worth a look.
- Again, you used low walls in front of high walls to prevent assassin attacks. And again, my hint: prevent access to the gatehouses from the outer low walls. Moreover, if you use low walls, use it on all sides (and especially on those sides that are facing the edge of the castles!), or they are relatively useless. I talk about the left-most sub-castle, where this is not the case.
- I noticed that the (center) castle is actually OPEN, meaning that enemies can just walk into it and attack the Lord. (Not that easy, because there are quite many killing pits and pitches and a lot of towers with archers and crossbowmen, but still...) I think, adding (additional) gates might be better here. (If you really want to have an open castle, you need to concentrate your defenses (troop spots, engineers with boiling oil, dog cages, pitch ditch, killing pits, ...) on that spots, and this is not the case in this design.)
- You use good things here, and with only 3 iron mines (standard amount for Wolf, aiv-independent) and positive fear factor, he might have big troubles with getting the needed amounts of iron for all of his armourers and blacksmiths. Keep that in mind, as when running out of iron, he will (like any ai) do the following: 1. Set all of his armourers and blacksmiths to sleep (even when some of them are currently still producing something). 2. Buy 2 iron. 3. Set to non-sleep again. 4. Repeat as soon as those 2 iron are taken away by the fastest smiths. This can cost him a lot of money and weapons.
- 6 inns (enough for 6x30 = 180 population with +8 bonus) are more than necessary here.
- The houses are placed very late, causing a lack of peasants/workers early on.
- Same as for the Snake castle: You tend to place a lot of walls and crenellations before adding the necessary towers and/or wall parts for enclosing the areas.
- The stairs don't work (for details see above "general hints").
- One of the outer castles is filled with buildings at the very last building steps, while its walls are built about 200 building steps earlier. Seems a bit pointless to me.
- Adding pitch ditches everywhere between the castle buildings might prove a 2-bladed sword, but of course it can help in defending sometimes.
- Putting at least one "oil" troop spot onto the keep could prove quite useful.
- In most (all but one) of the 6 outer castles you have a lot of buildings and no single well - in other words: Happy burning!
WOLFI: Wow, this is a big one! And (at least for me) it seems there are glitches if I view it in the aiv editor. Not sure though, if that's the fault of the file or not. Probably such a huge castle might be barely useable, but you included it just as a bonus, and it looks nice somehow... Sorry, no additional comments on that now.
Now, this may look a bit devastating, but don't despair, there have been much worse castles than yours, and especially for a first try your castles really are not bad actually.
In the beginning, everyone makes some mistakes and there are a few things that one can only know by experience and testing the aiv files in the game by playing with/against them.
Looking forward to more designs coming from you! [Edited on 05/19/13 @ 03:02 PM]
|
LordPsycom
File Author |
Posted on 05/23/13 @ 06:33 AM
Thx alot. I knew that there are a lot of mistakes. And thx to let me know them. Yes, i want to make some more castles, and i will post them here. Next castles are again for my favourite ki, the wolf. But I make another one for the pig. I hope, that I can keep your ideas and tips in mind. Thx for your help... |
LordPsycom
File Author |
Posted on 05/28/13 @ 02:27 AM
Hey, I uploaded some new AIV files (in a ZIP folder), I think it was 6 days ago. Now it won't appear here. Do I have to make the whole work again? Please answer me fast! I would be happy...
Lord Psycom |
HGDL v0.8.2 |
Statistics |
Downloads: | 682 |
Favorites: [] | 0 |
Size: | 149.50 KB |
Added: | 05/05/13 |
|