Awesome software, Jack, and the rate at which you update it is astounding...Great work!

Thanks,
jrbentley

My personal thanks again Jack for this awesome work. I can't wait to try that new faster tribe movement. I must give you a couple more .

Epidemic is working wrong in a couple ways.

* It's choosing region and strength off the same card. This should be resolved with 2 different draws (the world of Pocket Civ is harsh...).
* It's somehow incorrectly resolving the tribe deaths, but I can't figure out how. In the instance I had just now, it infected a region, strength 4, then jumped to another region correctly, dropping to strength 3, then jumped to a 3rd region correctly. At this point, it suddenly dropped to strength 0 and didn't kill the tribe in the 3rd region.

Tribal War is wrong. The active region should always lose 3 tribes (1 with Music), not double the base amount.

Attacks are wrong. See below pasted resolution. Attack force gets reduced to 2, "bounces off" the city. This should end it, but the attacking force moves on anyway. I bolded the significant line.

---
Invasion starts in Region #8.
Region #8 tribes reduced by 1 down to 1. Attacking force reduced by 1 down to 6.
Region #8 tribes reduced by 1 down to 0. Attacking force reduced by 1 down to 5.
Attacking force invades Region #2 (player choice).
Region #2 tribes reduced by 1 down to 2. Attacking force reduced by 1 down to 4.
Region #2 tribes reduced by 1 down to 1. Attacking force reduced by 1 down to 3.
Region #2 tribes reduced by 1 down to 0. Attacking force reduced by 1 down to 2.
Region #2 destroy attacking force.
Attacking force invades Region #6 (player choice).
Region #6 tribes reduced by 1 down to 0. Attacking force reduced by 1 down to 1.
Attacking force invades Region #5 (player choice).
Region #5 tribes reduced by 1 down to 0. Attacking force reduced by 1 down to 0.
Tribes remaining in Empire: 5

Fishing plus cartage still doesn't work right.

In my current game, I have an 8-region empire. 6 regions border the sea; 2 do not. I have 2 farms, neither of which are in my non-sea regions. This empire should be 100% supported. However, if I build a city in either of the non-sea regions, it dies at end of turn.

I have a save game for you, which I'll send along to your email.

Another bug. When I try to move tribes between bordering regions, it's bringing up the options "send all by sea" and "send 1 by sea". It does this even though I don't have sea movement.

I'll send you the map for this one, too. If you click around, you'll note that when you select some regions for movement, not the entire region is highlighted. It's maybe having difficult with regions over size 4? Or with regions that border the edge of the world?

Also, if "send 1 by sea" and "send all by sea" are my only options, I wouldn't be able to, for instance, send 2 tribes from a region with 4? Because that would be bad.

Tsunami doesn't look like it's working right. It failed to affect neighoring regions on the same sea (just affected the Active Region).

Advancing cities still isn't quite right. When I use multiple tribes to advance a city I (incorrectly) can't select more than one tribe/region.

I've experienced the "send by sea" bug too.

Usability tips, mostly in order by ease of implementation, on the off chance that you haven't thought of them:

The program should remember the directory you're saving files to, rather than making you navigate to it every time you open/save. Are you using a user settings file? This would be a natural for that.

The behavior on saving files isn't consistent with other apps: it always asks if you want to overwrite when you try to save a file of the same name, instead of asking once and then deciding that you know what you're talking about.

It might be a good idea to change the caption on the "Next" button to indicate what you're going to be doing next. It's really easy to get wrapped up in what you're doing and then find that you've skipped tribe movement and clicked "Next" to draw the event card.

The dialog for attacks and epidemics is problematic: The region-selection dialog pops up, and when you choose a city a modal dialog pops up for you to select the next region. Which means that you can't move the first dialog to look at your map, since it's waiting for the modal dialog to close. You'd be better off putting all of this into the same dialog, so it can be dragged around.

It might also be worth putting in the time to make a UI widget that lets you select a number of tribes from one or more regions - one that shows you how many tribes each region has, lets you select up to that number, lets you reset the selection and try again, etc. I think you'd use that a lot.

Bug: Navigation is not allowing sea movement at all. Sea movement seemed to be working for Fishing but it is having some difficulty noticing which regions are adjacent to the same sea (sorry, I didn't save the map).

Hey kids,

Just got back. I'll take a look at these bugs (and more) over the next couple days and see what I can take care of.


Thanks much!

J.

Right off the bat, I wanted to thank you for your well versed and thoughtful take on the game... On with the points... Hit the original poster's Richard's comments up above, but I will sum up as I go anyways... here goes...

(and by the way, my summary of his comments is pretty abrupt - not out of rudeness, simply because I want to save space, answer the question and get back to real life job #2)...

-- Saving file directory.

Yep, using a settings file... I've thought about this, but spending time getting the rules down was more important. I'll try and get this in the next release.

-- Saving files is kludgy...

Agreed. Save is working better than it had been once I figured out I could split scenarios and games and saves out. This is evolving and will be worked on.

-- Making 'Next' on the main screen more meaningful...

Oddly enough, I hadn't even thought of this one and it's an excellent idea. This will be in the next release.

-- Attack dialog sucks.

You ain't kidding. I hate the attack dialog.

My plan was to get the rules basically working (which they are getting to, given the complexity of the PocketCiv sets) - and move everything to the main map. The reason why the attack dialog is particularly nasty is because of all the things that can happen on your typical visitation. The code is ugly underneath as well. I can't stand that dialog. Eke.

All of PocketCiv is procedural - do this, don't do that, apply this bonus in this particular order. I'm not a big fan of wizards, however, as a usability thing, it was stick with something relatively easy to do and uniform versus odd ways of working things and making the code harder to understand while learning the rules. Tough call.

So, in any event, yes, the attack dialog will get cleaned up. The map itself could be presented on each wizard for choosing things and showing event progress, but that will be in a later release because it needs planned out. Moving it all to the main screen in a clean, easy to follow way is the end game - just not sure when I want to get there.

. . . .

Once again, thank you for your comments. That's why this game is alpha and free and not released, DirectX and $20. :-)

Crabs or Sea Bugs or Navigation ain't working right...

Just a note that on the navigation bugs, I've noticed if you use region squares near the edges of the map, things get strange. If you guys could message me log files, map files, save game files, etc. Either design toward the middle or send me some maps/saves/log files to help me along.



Thanks!

Jack

Also worth noting that Astronomy can also blow things up under certain conditions that I still haven't figured out yet either.

Again, Thanks,

Jack

I think I figured out the Fishing Bug - Fishing is overriding normal city upkeep (farms).

So cities die if they don't have fishing support (i.e. once you take fishing you cannot maintain an inland city.)

There may also be some odd tribe death with fishing that I haven't quite figured out

Probably from hooks in their eyes.

Sounds like a new disaster waiting to happen.

Actually, it was the way I was counting the farms and getting things confused with how Fishing and Cartage all can effect each other. It also has a lot to do with the fact that my program was not determining all of the coast line that was along a region to figure out what it bordered. This will be fixed up in the next release. I think I also figured out why the attacks were messing up (if I had a city or modification that was an odd case, I wasn't setting the attacking force's value to zero). And, as a quick little update, I added more descriptive text to the 'Next' button so it was more obvious what you needed to do during a turn.

Next release will be in the next couple days. I'm looking at some of the other issues that had been noted above and I'm trying to get those knocked out before I begin moving things out of the dialogs and into the main board - which is a big reason why we're still alpha.


Thanks much,

J.

Suggestion:

Creating a "tutorial" with a simple pre-generated countryside, showing a noob player all game options and proceedings.

Is it possible also to pre-draw cards from the deck? So that the user only clicks through and every game is the same?

Tutorial - A good idea... Through the game would be neat. I'll have to mull that one over.

As for predrawn cards, it is sorta there already for a given era but not for an entire game. It would not take much to add this, however, it's somewhat low on my list at the moment. We'll see where things go once some of the above rule things get cleaned up.


J.

Sure sure, just add it to the To-Do list

Pocket Civ 0.4.0 Released...

Just a quick note that the latest version of the game can be found at http://www.jkntech.com. This version has updated graphics and the size of the download has gone up considerably, but is still reasonable (12-20 MB or so).

Changes/Fixes include:

0.4.0 - Added new graphics for regions, sea, and frontiers. Special thanks to Andrei (again).
- Changed look of moving tribes from blue regions to wide arrows.
- Fixed another bug with Fishing/Cartage and cities on the coast versus inland cities.
- Fixed another bug with Fishing/Navigation. Cleared up menu that shows options for sending tribes overseas.
- Fixed bug on Attack where the finishing blow from City AV or Advance would not kill the attackers.
- Added information panel on side of screen for selected region.
- Changed button text on lower right of screen to help prompt next actions.
- Fixed bug where Astronomy turns a new card over without a new event and crashes the program.
- Added more inituitive tribe placement, i.e., wherever you drop them off is where they stay.
- Turned rendering detail down slightly because of latest graphics additions.

Looks nice! Fluffy work, man!

I really like the new tribe movement and 'next' button. Excellent.