Knights of the Cardboard Castle

As promised, here’s my implementation of the Caylus: Magna Carta boardgame in Python. It uses the original art scanned from the game, which naturally I do not own, and I will therefore take it down immediately if anyone complains. It’s single-player against the AI only, but as with the boardgame you can select between one and three opponents.

Usage note:

• It runs in a window with a fixed resolution of 1,280 x 960. I understand this causes problems for some people, but there’s no easy way to fix this.
• The main menu offers an AI Cheats option which isn’t implemented and therefore does nothing. My original idea was to allow the AI to know what cards the human player is currently holding in his/her hand and to allow the AI to know which card(s) it is going to draw before it  actually does so.
• At the present time, the AI does cheat somewhat though everything technically is still legal. See if you can spot how the AI cheats! This is a game of almost perfect information anyway.
• My feedback indicates that the AI does decently but don’t expect miracles. It is not a true AI in the sense that it searches through a tree of all possibilities and chooses a decision that maximizes its own points while minimizing those of its opponents. Instead, it uses a set of arbitrary heuristics to make decisions, which I based on how I would play the game myself.
• The download is kind of big because I stupidly used uncompressed bitmaps during development. I recently tried to just resave the art assets in a more compressed format, but it looks like I would need to manually retouch them again to make them look right. So bitmaps it is. Sorry.
• Again, if you send me bug reports I’ll fix them, especially if you spot places where the rules aren’t being complied with or crash errors. But I probably won’t be adding any new features.

Downloads

• This is the standalone version of the program. Just unzip it somewhere and launch caylusmc.exe.
• This contains the Python sources, including the PGU components that I used for the UI. To run this, you’ll need the Python interpreter (version 3+) and the appropriate version of the Pygame library installed.

Hope you all like it!

Sanctum is an indie-produced tower defense game with one unique feature: the player has an avatar and can shoot at the invading waves as it it were a FPS game. Defense Grid, which I absolutely loved, is the natural point of comparison so that’s what I’ll use. Oddly enough the game appears to agree with me. The first two words uttered by the announcer whenever you load a level is indeed “defense grid”. Unfortunately for Coffee Stain Studios, I find the older game to be superior in just about every respect.

• This game is played exclusively in the first-person view. There is a top-down view which you use to get an overview of the map but you can’t do anything in this screen except click on “televators”, basically elevated teleport pads, to get around the map quickly. Everything else including building towers and upgrading and selling them is done in the first-person view. While there’s a certain novelty value to running around the map building towers in the first-person, it gets old quickly especially if the map geography makes it hard to get some tower locations into direct line of sight.

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Like all Sims type games, you have to decide how and when you want to end a game in Guild 2: Renaissance. Technically the scenario ends only when the last member of my rival dynasty, the Muresans, are dead but short of devoting all of my resources to murdering each and every one of them, down to the last child, I can’t see how that would be possible in any reasonable amount of time. Even adopting an orphan from the church counts as adding a family member. So I’ve decided to try to get a Kant family member to become sovereign (mayor actually) and end the game on that note.

Of course it can’t be Julia Kant as she is too old and sure enough in autumn 1472 she passes away peacefully. I pull in Clarissa Kant, Harold’s sister, but she’s just a placeholder while Maria Kant’s son, Bradley, grows up. So the plan is for Maria Kant, the new matriarch to work on her political career while the other two focus on making money. That means putting all available XP into the rhetoric and empathy skills.

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So I recently figured out how to use cx_Freeze to make a standalone distributable of a Python game made using the Pygame library. It turned out to be an embarrassingly simple fix (you just need to add “import pygame._view”). So I’m making available my adaptation of the Blood Valley gamebook, written by Mark Smith and Jamie Thompson.

Disclaimers: This is pretty much a faithful conversion of the entire gamebook and I obviously don’t own the property. This is a just a private, for fun programming project. If the property owners are upset about this I’ll take it down immediately. This is also a very rough, very buggy program currently. Expect crashes and typographical errors. Hopefully it won’t blow up your computer.

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After refusing to pay the ransom for Harold Kant a few times, the kidnappers release him anyway. I notice him seeking treatment at the infirmary. After that he wiles away his time hanging out at our competitor’s tavern. The bastard. Maybe he’s upset about his family hanging him out to dry. Once you release a family member from active control, you can never get him or her back again so he’s completely irrelevant.

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So I went ahead and finished Dead Space 2 before completing my Guild 2: Renaissance game diary. And it wasn’t because it was that good. It was because I wanted to get it over with. About half-way through the game, I discovered the oddity I’ve noticed early on was a gamebreaking bug.

Many powerful items at the automated store were priced at 0 and schematics didn’t matter because everything was available from the beginning. I found it odd at first that the weapons were all priced at 0 but ammunition cost money and dismissed it as the designers wanting to allow players to try all the weapons. In fact this was a bug introduced in a patch to introduce DLC items to the Steam version of the game and EA didn’t see fit to devote resources to make sure this didn’t break the game. I didn’t want to restart all over again so I plodded on, grimacing in displeasure all the time.

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In late spring 1448 the Kant family builds a farm, something I’ve wanted to do for a long time. I don’t expect to make much money selling goods from it directly but it will allow us to avoid buying wheat from the market and hopefully it can supply enough beef to our inn so that we can serve roast beef all the time. I know revenge is cool and important but everything runs on money here. This brings us to four businesses within our family empire. It doesn’t look like any other family in town has more than two businesses.

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With no one currently in the magistrate’s post, I’m tempted to stick Harold there even if it would be difficult to pull off because the King hates me and he’s a key elector. But I find that I can’t. Despite the position’s description saying that you need a citizen title, which everyone in the family has, the game says that Harold isn’t qualified enough. I’m not sure if it’s a bug or if it’s because only the pater familias (i.e. Georg) can apply for posts at full rank. Harold can apply for posts at one rank lower just fine.

But the point becomes moot quickly when someone else gets the post. So off Harold goes again to file his grievance against Kalman Selmeczi and this time it works! In fact, as soon as Harold walks away from the court clerk, we get a message that we don’t need a trial at all because Kalman confesses to his crimes and is sentenced to imprisonment. Hurray!

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