Didz's Dumb Question Thread

**Monsieur Alphonse** · 03-25-2009, 18:31

When your gentlemen enters a foreign school, the tech list comes up and you can chose what to steal. It is like researching a tech. After being successful you have to walk back to your territory I believe since I have never been successful in stealing a tech. My agents were always detected.

With FRAPPS you could take better screenshots then was possible in M2TW. It works very easy.

**Didz** · 03-25-2009, 18:50

Originally Posted by Monsieur Alphonse

When your gentlemen enters a foreign school, the tech list comes up and you can chose what to steal. It is like researching a tech. After being successful you have to walk back to your territory I believe since I have never been successful in stealing a tech. My agents were always detected.

Yes! when you enter the school. But quite honestly it can take four or five turns to reach the school and I don't want to waste all that time just to find that there's nothing there worth stealing. Incidently, the affects of successfully stealing one is instant, the tech is added to your tech tree as soon as you have stolen it.

Originally Posted by Monsieur Alphonse

With FRAPPS you could take better screenshots then was possible in M2TW. It works very easy.

Well I'm still waiting for a response to my ticket with Sega Pass, but I did try and find a download site for frapps and all I got were American college websites. Do you know where I can get it?

**quadalpha** · 03-25-2009, 18:57

It's spelt fraps (one p).

I thought one of the patches has fixed the alt+tabbing. It works for me, at least.

I don't think there's a way around the diplo screen for seeing other nations' tech. And you'll probably learn what schools look like in a while :) Personally I found gentlemen much more useful sitting in a school of my own rather than faffing about and probably getting assassinated.

**andrewt** · 03-25-2009, 19:02

There are two ways to trade.

1. There's a land route from your capital to the other faction's capital. You must control the provinces in between.

2. There's a route between your home port and the other faction's home port. If their home port gets blockaded, you don't get trade no matter how many other ports in other provinces they have.

**magnum** · 03-25-2009, 19:30

Ok, that was a forehead-keyboard moment. Thanks! Good to know not so much as I intend to steal tech from the AI, but I now know that the AI isn't sending Gentlemen to my schools just to conduct honorable duels. Need to be killing those scum.

**Ordani** · 03-26-2009, 01:00

gfx_screenshot_folder ./screenshots; # gfx_screenshot_folder <folder>, Folder to where save screenshots relative to Empire directory #

is defined in the preferences scripts but doesn't exist by default. They have code to do it, question is whether or not it's turned on.

**Didz** · 03-26-2009, 01:04

Originally Posted by Ordani

gfx_screenshot_folder ./screenshots; # gfx_screenshot_folder <folder>, Folder to where save screenshots relative to Empire directory #

is defined in the preferences scripts but doesn't exist by default. They have code to do it, question is whether or not it's turned on.

I had a scan through that earlier but didn't spot anything to do with screenshots I'll have another look. As I said, Sega Pass claim the screenshots work the same way in ETW as they did in previous games but that doesn't seem to be true, unless its a case of turning the feature on somehow.

The parent folder is there where they say it should be e.g. C:\Documents and Settings\<user name>\Application Data\The Creative Assembly\Empire but the tga folder is missing.

So, the line in the preferences.empire_script file reads

gfx_screenshot_folder ./screenshots; # gfx_screenshot_folder <folder>, Folder to where save screenshots relative to Empire directory #

Do you think its just a case of replacing <folder> with C:\Documents and Settings\<user name>\Application Data\The Creative Assembly\Empire\tga ?

**quadalpha** · 03-26-2009, 03:57

Can't hurt to try.

**Didz** · 03-26-2009, 22:53

Couple more dumb questions that sprung to mind last night.

1) Can socket bayonets be unfixed?

Wiggy says they can, but I see no button to do so. Also does having them fixed slow down reloading as in real life.

2) Do bridge battles work the same way as in MTW2?

I've noticed various bridges and fords on the map, but wondered if positioning your army ON one actually triggers a bridge battle as it does in MTW2. Anyone tried this yet?

**MikeV** · 03-27-2009, 00:52

Originally Posted by Didz

I had a scan through that earlier but didn't spot anything to do with screenshots I'll have another look. As I said, Sega Pass claim the screenshots work the same way in ETW as they did in previous games but that doesn't seem to be true, unless its a case of turning the feature on somehow.

The parent folder is there where they say it should be e.g. C:\Documents and Settings\<user name>\Application Data\The Creative Assembly\Empire but the tga folder is missing.

So, the line in the preferences.empire_script file reads

gfx_screenshot_folder ./screenshots; # gfx_screenshot_folder <folder>, Folder to where save screenshots relative to Empire directory #

Do you think its just a case of replacing <folder> with C:\Documents and Settings\<user name>\Application Data\The Creative Assembly\Empire\tga ?

I'm suspicious: the default setting in the file uses the "./" prefix, which is typical on Unix but not on Windoze. So, I wonder which style slashification works, and whether it can handle spaces in the path name.

Requires further experimentation by those patient enough ...

It would seem that the simplest approach would be to create a "screenshots" folder in the Empire directory and leave the default setting alone.

**MikeV** · 03-27-2009, 00:49

Originally Posted by andrewt

There are two ways to trade.

1. There's a land route from your capital to the other faction's capital. You must control the provinces in between.

2. There's a route between your home port and the other faction's home port. If their home port gets blockaded, you don't get trade no matter how many other ports in other provinces they have.

So, the case they missed was a route from your home region to theirs, where one or the other does not directly contain a port, but has a valid path to a port (such as Great Britain to/from Russia).

Guess it's meant to keep land-locked factions (like Austria) puny and poor, and naval powers (like Portugal) huge and powerful, just like IRL of the time.