Final A5 Patch:
Right now we are working on putting everything I think needs to be in the 'final patch' for A5, at which point I will replace the 'early release' version on the download section with a 'full release' along with a patch 2 download for anyone who already has the A5 version.
Then I will spend a bit of time doing a bit of advertising for A5, I never got around to posting a front page article for the release of A5 so hopefully I will get that done then. For some more interest in the mod.
My forward momentum has stalled a little bit, due to difficulty fixing a few bugs, these are now done and dusted, so I just need to ramp up my motivation and get the last few things done and settled and tie a bow on it!
'So what is coming?' I hear you cry!
Well I shall tell you if you would just stop yelling at me!
Gamespeed:
In the last month or so, I learned just how short some people like their civ games, (I play the mega long kitchen sink mods on mega long speeds, so I am very much the tortoise and not the hare in these things.) that quick and normal speeds in bts are about 300 and 500 turns long, I decided I needed to try and do some work on this end of the player spectrum.
So I took a big hammer to the game speed file to try and bash out two game speeds that would come close to fitting this profile.
I am aiming for a less than 500 turn speed and a less than 1000 turn speed (currently my quick speed plays out for the AI in about 300-360 turns which is about right) So hopefully it will be about double that for normal speed. (Hope that will go some way to making speedy gamers happier with the mod!)
AI:
We continue our quest to make the AI better at FTTW, we just changed the escort code for settlers, so that they can have up to 6 escorts rather than just 2 (which was hardcoded for the AI) now that my version is working again, I am looking to see if this is enough to make the AI a more aggressive and hard core expander than previously, as it was being doubled in points by me by the early mid game, purely because it constanly ran away from any monster that was outside it's borders, instead of manning up and taking ground. Archid reported seeing a settler go up to 10 squares outside of border to make a new settlement, so initial intel suggests a big thumbs up. We just need to see if there are any other major flaws in the AI' thinking like small hardcoded numbers that are awful in our crazy apocalyptic world!
Dynamic Traits:
This has been completely rebuilt from scratch by archid (instead of reverse engineered from the old scraps of code) in A5 this won't really mean very much (a few nice graphical additions is about it I think) but it sets us up with an architecture for expanding the system more easily, along with a lot of new capabilities that will (Hopefully) be one of the main contributors to the A6 build content. I will explain more about this once we are done with Patch 2 and I can share my future design plans for A6.
Bug Fixing:
There will be numerous small and big bug fixes, some CTD bugs, display bugs, xml typos and duplications, so overall a good round of polishing reaped from stress testing the new build over some play throughs.
ETA will hopefully not be too long, it really depends on my energy and motivation for the tasks left to do.
A lot of the time being busy work and play throughs.
Remember you can always join the development conversation over at our forum at civfanatics:
Forums.civfanatics.com
Stay Safe Out There Wastelanders!
