Smart Creature Training Map - Myths, Facts, Suggestions/Ideas are welcome.

Morphie

Morphie

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Feb 11, 2009
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Greetings,

I came on a idea of creating a creature training map that actually teaches your creature to do the stuff correctly. Most of creature training maps I've seen only contain the miracles placed into one area so that you can get the percentages of knowing the miracle up quickly, but what your creature is missing is the fact that he does not know Why, When and Where to cast the miracles. The point of this map is simple, you walk from one town to another as you have teached your creature the miracles in it!

Also I thought it be booring to start this all alone, so I don't mind anyone joining the club - why not make it all together :)

I would like to add that suggestions of how to exactly place the miracles near the areas where they most likely are need to be cast are most welcome.  And ideas how to make it efficent to work!

I'm leaving currently (temporary) some of the miracles out of it as I don't got any idea where they seem to fit most perfectly. They are the following miracles:
  • Agressive Creature Miracle
  • Loving Creature Miracle
  • Freeze Creature Miracle
  • Holy Flies Creature Miracle
  • Invisibilty Creature Miracle
  • Weakness Creature Miracle
  • Strenght Creature Miracle
  • Enlarge Creature Miracle
  • Shrink Creature Miracle
  • Pack of Wolves Miracle
  • Mega-blast Miracle

Presquites
  • A new and custom suitable landscape and layout to make it look even more original.
  • Scripting - although it is fairly simple in this matter, but everybody is welcome to aid.
  • Suggestions and new ideas always welcome.

Landscape - I must admit that I have not been messing around with the landscape editors for very long and I keep failing creating a nice looking landscape. Hopefully there will be someone around to assist with this. Read about the map layout below.
Scripting - As I mentioned it is fairly simple itself, as there exist such applications as BWWorldMod to aid with this - however! The progress creating towns and placing buildings and villagers and other objects that are made from suggestions/ideas could be shared between few persons.

The first town.
The first town will cover how to learn the following actions
  • Casting Wood and Food miracles on the village store when the needs are high.
  • Using Miraculous Water on the trees and fields.
  • Learning to use the village store
  • Knowing that your creature can pick crops from field
  • Learning how to raise or lower the town center totem
  • Learning how to fish

The Basic Miracles
  • Miraculous Food
  • Miraculous Wood
  • Miraculous Water

As you enter the world, your first town will have these 3 miracle dispensers that are placed near the positions where they are need to be used.

The second town.
The second town will cover how to learn the following actions
  • Casting Fireball (?) maybe it needs to be more specific, why and when
  • Casting Lightning (?) maybe it needs to be more specific, why and when
  • Casting Storm (?) maybe it needs to be more specific, why and when

The Basic Offensive Miracles
  • Fireball
  • Lightning Bolt
  • Rain Storm Miracle

As you reach the second town, these miracles are available for you to teach to your creature. The red question marks mean that I'm not sure how can you tell your creature Why, When and Where to use these miracles. Maybe one of the possibilities would be adding a computer opponent or a creature AI? Any suggestions and ideas are welcome.

The third town.
The third town will cover how to learn the following actions
  • Casting Shield on a object (area?) to protect it from spells/attacks (?) why and where would I like to have my creature doing it?
  • Casting Pyhsical Shield on a object to protect it from damage (?) why and where would I like to have my creature doing it?
  • Using heal on villagers (?)
Defensive & Supportive Miracles
  • Shield
  • Physical Shield
  • Healing Miracle

Another one that I'm not sure how would it be the best to do it, adding an addtional computer opponent and expanding it's influence and placing rocks in the area so that it will attempt to attack your creature while buildings get crushed? Not sure and suggestions/ideas are welcome.

The fourth town.
The fourth town will cover how to learn the following actions
  • Taking over a village or just impressing the villagers with Miraculous Flock of birds
  • Using Forest miracle (?) needs to be more specified

Highly Impressive Miracles
  • Miraculous Flock of Birds
  • Forest

This town believes in noone yet, maybe add a number of belief needed in order to take over this town and learn the progress. Forest and Flock of Birds dispensers would be placed on the edge of this village.

This is not complete, yet if the idea of creating it gets supported then we could make start with it :)
 
Interesting idea. That's sorta how I wrote my training map to be.

http://www.bwfiles.com/files/index.php?action=file&id=147
 
Uh oh :shocked! Haven't tried it yet but will check it out right now :)! I'm currently trying so hard to create the landscape using BWSurveyor :p I got that thought after I played the Kilroys training map, I was already thinking that there might be kinda similar map around that I don't know of lol... :P but going to check what is your map about.
 
I have messed up my landfiles by mistake, I have edited and converted my Land1.lnd and Land2.lnd files to be flat in the BWSurveyor. Are these files uploaded at Kayssplace somewhere couldn't find them at the downloads area though, I accidentaly saved those files duh! But I did notice something with BWSurveyor if you don't save the land file you are editing with another name or to another place it doesen't get bugged, if I saved it to another place some of my blocks dissapeared I was reading about it also in another thread. But is there any way for me to obtain these 2 files other than reinstalling my game, somewhere ? :p
 
If you're just going to flatten those lands there is aan app in the Downloads which can flatten a landscape.

http://www.bwfiles.com/files/index.php?action=file&id=998

You're saving problem could have some to do with the .fot files in the landscape folder. I forget what they do though.

Here a link to those two landscapes. That's something we don't normally host.

http://www.bwfiles.com/stuff/Maps.zip
 
Thanks a bunch for the land files Kays! My game seemed to crash when I tried to use land2 before.

And I just tried your map out, I think it's very good and makes sense where the miracles are placed for use specially what caught my attention was the Enlarge Creature Miracle placed near the big stones :D. Although I never tried to make any map before and since I started this thread so blindly I will try to go on with it as well.

There are serval miracles that I don't get it how they would be the best to teach to your creature, they are Fireball, Lightning, Rain Storm, Pack of Wolves and the both Shield miracles. Leaving out the Shield ones currently and concentrating on the others I mentioned, the creature should have to know Why and When to cast those miracles at. Maybe few of miracles are better to teach to your pet while in multiplayer against other people :p?
 
Part of training is how "you" want your creature to act in certain circunstances. So it's difficult to make a map for all occassions. That's why there's few aggressive miracles in my map.

For the aggressive miracles I think it would be best to create a multi-god map.
 
Hehe, so I gave a start with my own landscape. Though it seems more complicated than I thought it is the problem for me seems the beach line, I want it to be smooth but it seems like it's too squeary. Now what can I do to remove the squares located in beach?

I started it in BWSurveyor, set the altitude to 000 and used the option 'level map' and then again I set the altitude to 3 and made a isle looking creation :P then I set the altitude to 6 and made a 'inner circle' that would seperate the beach. If I get rid of those squeary bits then I load the map in SculptED and conjure up the rest of landscape, mountains etc. but hopefuly someone can give some advice who has done this before :P would be much appreciated. Also I haven't added textures to the beach yet as I don't see it would change anything at the moment.

I'd Really love to get hang of it :p though learning always takes time.

I'll show some images of my beach and comparing it with the original LH beach




And the original beach




I made a red line around a area of what I'm not sure of :P how can I create it

and one more closer shot of that area... it seems like water is on it's surface. Shallow water
 
Yah, the beaches are a bit of a pain. See if this post helps any.

http://www.bwfiles.com/boards/index.php?topic=1743.msg21977#msg21977
 
As Kay stated, it's tough to teach your creature certain things to be done agressive as he does it in that circumstance. It's possible to teach your creature to be outright mean to everyone who is not with you, but it's overall a circumstance thing.

Kay's map was a good one and I did some training there myself. It's also a smart idea to pick up Cache's Cheat pack, back up your land files and add miracle dispensers. You can really get a better grip on what he should do.

Now, one thing I always asked myself is if my creature knew what land he is on, and if he remembers everything he was taught like I had last time. I questioned this when I was in 1v1 Skirmish and I taught him some things about the Celtic village there and where to get the wood from the forest. I went in on a different save and he was doing the same thing as before. I don't know if it was a conceidence, or if I had taught him to do something he related to that land, or if I taught him to gather from a forest and take it to the store and he ran the same path as last time.
 
Although slightly off topic, this is in reply to that last paragraph.

Some time ago after spending a while on a map with another creature doing some aggressive training I took my creature back to my training map for some R&R. One of the thing I like to do is to take up the coast to impress the Celtic village. This time after his usual round of impressive miracles he gathered the villagers around him and got into story telling. This has always fascinated me so as usual , I watched. Normally the stories are just a series of gesture which don't seem to mean much. But in watching this time I started to realise that he was telling the story of his encounter with the creature on the previous map. This blew me away since he was repeating the gestures used by both himself and the other creature in that encounter.

The creature AI might not be perfect, but it's still pretty amazing what they are capable of.
 
Quite true.

Much like people with real intelligence, the B&W1 creature AI is very much hit-and-miss, but I always thought that was part of it charm :D .
 
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