Chaos Gameplay

orlanth said:

I like the idea of eventually having some Commander-type units that serve a leadership role in their armies similar to tabletop WH.. We should probably just focus on cranking out the already designed units/techs XML etc for now; but that idea of potentially using some Great People to act as the lower-level generic Champions/Heroes etc prevalent in WH is worth a thought for later (just settling them for various production boni can be rather dull). I think Xienwolf is now focusing his work on extending advanced AI handling of current FF features (another benefit of sticking to standard FF codebase so we can update it easily); so hopefully this might be a workable/fun game feature in future.


Absolutely! This doc ->
http://modiki.civfanatics.com/index.php/Civ4LeaderHeadInfos
is a treasure trove of leaderhead tweaks, enabling plenty of scope for scheming Skaven (iDemandRebukedSneakProb), rabidly intolerant Estalians (iDifferentReligionAttitudeChange), Dwarves with ridiculously long memories (crank up those MemoryDecays and MemoryAttitudePercents etc), raving/warmongering Chaos, and all kinds of other assorted goodness (and badness). Ahriman as you were asking about tech Flavors, leaders can have different preferences toward the Flavors (Economy, Military, Magic etc) coded here; I think that's largely the extent of what flavors do.
Not much changed about leaderheads in FF, but a few new tags from FfH are documented here as well:
http://forums.civfanatics.com/showthread.php?t=238077

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Hey cool thanks for the info! Definitely we have our work cut out for right now without trying to add more to it. I just like to post ideas as I get them before I forget. LOL dwarves with ridiculously long memories, should make for an interesting game.

Ahriman as you were asking about tech Flavors, leaders can have different preferences toward the Flavors (Economy, Military, Magic etc) coded here; I think that's largely the extent of what flavors do.

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I'm aware in theory of what they do, but my detailed questions about flavor are:
a) What are the full list of flavors. (We could also mentally overwrite some existing flavors; eg make an in-game preference for something into an effective preference for magic, or religion)
b) How do the flavor weightings work. Does every tech have for eg total flavor values that add up to 10; so tech A might have 6 military 3 research and 1 culture while another has 2 military 3 culture and 5 gold?
Or do different techs have different total flavor values? Does the total value matter or only the relative rations between them?
c) How exactly do the AI preferences for flavor work? They just need a value between x and y for each flavor? What are x and y?

If I know this, then I can do a design for the flavors for the tech tree and the leader preferences.

Do the leaders already have designed LeaderHeadInfo values for peace weight and warmonger respect etc?
If not I can go through and design those too.

It's probably not worth spending a tremendous amount of effort pondering about flavor weights (they're literally just for "flavor" so preferences can be modestly different between leaders), but you can easily edit them in XML yourself if you're interested (definitely not something worth typing out on a message board and then retyping in XML later.)
As far as I could find out, the flavors are defined in Globaltypes.xml and are currently
<FlavorType>FLAVOR_MILITARY</FlavorType>
<FlavorType>FLAVOR_RELIGION</FlavorType>
<FlavorType>FLAVOR_PRODUCTION</FlavorType>
<FlavorType>FLAVOR_GOLD</FlavorType>
<FlavorType>FLAVOR_SCIENCE</FlavorType>
<FlavorType>FLAVOR_CULTURE</FlavorType>
<FlavorType>FLAVOR_GROWTH</FlavorType>
<FlavorType>FLAVOR_ESPIONAGE</FlavorType>
Don't think anyone really knows the exact math, but you can get an idea of the current weightings by looking through the leaderhead, tech, and building XMLs.
The leaderheads have various weightings making them like any of flavors slightly more or less (mostly default 0 or no change), with some entries anywhere from around -10 to 30; I would bet these weights get multiplied by the weights on techs/buildings etc to make an adjustment factor for the base AI preferences according to leader personalities. So likely best for the AI's gameplay to avoid heavy tweaks to leader flavor preferences except where really needed, and let it decide as much as possible based on its strategic situation and the merits of each individual tech/unit/building.

Techs each have a combination of flavor weights adding up to 100 total, buildings/units seem to have no real systematic method, probably just thrown together on the fly to add some flavorful leader-specific AI preferences.

Do the leaders already have designed LeaderHeadInfo values for peace weight and warmonger respect etc? If not I can go through and design those too

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With all those tags its again something not worth typing out and then reentering into XML later, but you could tweak them yourself if you're inclined, the modiki doc is totally self-explanatory including value ranges and everything: http://modiki.civfanatics.com/index.php/Civ4LeaderHeadInfos

Ok, I may get to this at some point then. Possibly my first xml foray, when I get a bit of time. Seems like a fairly low priority.

Ahriman said:

Ok, I may get to this at some point then. Possibly my first xml foray, when I get a bit of time. Seems like a fairly low priority.

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You go Ahriman!