I was doing a bit of thinking yesterday, and it occurred to me that in reality, the military is part of the population. (well, I already knew that, but let's just go with this for the purpose of making the thread sound a bit more interesting.)

Anyway, seeing as that's how things are, why not make that so in Civ IV? I mean, settlers and workers make city growth stop completely when they're being created, so why not do the same for military units? Why not do that for all units, since every unit is literally part of the population?

This would require more strategy on the part of rushers and the like, and would really give some incentive to try and develop an early tech lead at the risk of not having a large military force. That said, when one runs out of buildings to produce (which is often the case) and doesn't want to halt city growth, we'd need to add a function for just that, in the vein of the Wealth/Research/Culture functions... Call it "Growth". I honestly don't think it's a bad idea. However, the AI might need a bit of help (or it might not; we could just test it as-is and go from there if we run into a newly-retarded AI).

What do you guys think? I'm not too adept at C++ coding (read: not adept at all), though I have no problem with XML... Any volunteers?

Hey,

Just have a look at the assets/XML/Units/CIV4UnitInfos.xml file.
I guess you can implement that by settings the value bFood (between bAnimal and bNoBadGoodies) to 1. This way, I guess food will be used to produce the unit to stop the growth of the city ;)

If it does not work, then you'll probably have to look in the pyton scripts, but I doubt you'll need to do it.

Hey,

Just have a look at the assets/XML/Units/CIV4UnitInfos.xml file.
I guess you can implement that by settings the value bFood (between bAnimal and bNoBadGoodies) to 1. This way, I guess food will be used to produce the unit to stop the growth of the city ;)

If it does not work, then you'll probably have to look in the pyton scripts, but I doubt you'll need to do it.

That was already known to me. However, it's the "Growth" option that would take some C++ programming... Something I'm not too proficient with.

Well, you've got two things here. The unit production halting growth is already easy enough to implement in the game. I wouldn't do it for ALL units since some of them would take such a small portion of the population that it would have a negligible effect.

The second part you're asking for seems to be a new Process called Growth that would accelerate (since cities grow naturally) the growth of a city. In effect then, you want a Process that either A) converts hammers to food (since food is the key to city growth) or B) decreases the amount of food necessary to be stored per level in order to advance to the next city size. That would need to be done in the SDK, but it's certainly possible.

Well, you've got two things here. The unit production halting growth is already easy enough to implement in the game. I wouldn't do it for ALL units since some of them would take such a small portion of the population that it would have a negligible effect.

The second part you're asking for seems to be a new Process called Growth that would accelerate (since cities grow naturally) the growth of a city. In effect then, you want a Process that either A) converts hammers to food (since food is the key to city growth) or B) decreases the amount of food necessary to be stored per level in order to advance to the next city size. That would need to be done in the SDK, but it's certainly possible.

1: I definitely wouldn't do it for all units... But, this brings up another idea of mine. Since siege units and the like (this counts for ships as well) take military poersonnel to operate them, would it be possible to change the SDK so that city production isn't halted, but delayed instead for production of all units, based on their type? We'd of course have to rework the entire units list for this to work, but I'd be up for it. Anything to balance gameplay.

2: Now that I think about it, "Growth" would be a triple-action funtion. "Growth 1" would convert Hammers to Food, so the city grows faster. "Growth 2" would help the city grow faster by decreasing the amount of necessary food storage. "Growth 3" would be your standard, general purpose stagnater function, for those times when you don't have the happy faces to make it to the next population level, and when there are no buildings left, and when you don't have the gold for a larger military. G3 almost seems redundant in that sense, but since that does happen, it'd be stupid not to put it in.


So, instead of all units stopping growth, they would just delay it by decreasing the amount of food available to the city until their production is complete. I'm not sure if that's entirely possible, but if it is, I think we may be on to something.