Alpha 6 T.E.C.S. Build: The Plan

The T.E.C.S. Build, Traits, Events, Civics, Specialists.

Is going to be all about expanding that.

Primarily the Traits and Civics.

The Main Goal:

The Deep Civic System.

This is going to involve a complete reqorking of all of the civics to be more unique and interesting, but it will also combine with the Traits system to create an Evolving Civic Effect.

What this will mean, is that the longer you run a civic for, the more powerful that civic will become.

So for example, if you ran the Professional Military Civic for 50 turns you would gain the PMC 1 Trait.
Which might give you access to a special training building, or perhaps a Private Military Company (Much like the Talon Mercs) which gives you a buildable unit that doesn't require resources or population.

Run it for 100 trns and you gain PMC 2. Unlocking even more powerful abilities.

If you stop running PMC, you will lose all of those traits and buildings and units.

So the more heavily you invest in Civic Specific Content, the more you will lose when/if you switch civics.

Secondary Goal:

Civic Synergy.

Civic Synergy will see you gaining Bonuses and Penalties for combinations of civics.

So if you select Military Civics across the board, you can bet you will get some fairly impressive Military Rewards.

If you ran a Democracy with Slavery for too long, you could find yourself being hit by all manner of negative effects as workers march in protest for all people to be equal under the law.

I still need to look in detail at the code, to make sure I can run synergies involving multiple civics, but i think I can.

Tertiary Goal:

New Specialists.

Doctors
Entertainers
Super Mutants
Ghouls
Scavengers
Military Trainers (Like the Great General Specialist)
Domesticated Slaves/Servants/Prison Labour
(These will generally produce less than Captured Slaves, but will also be more docile and won't randomly die. Also they will require a Pop.)
Robot
(probably acquired the same way as great specialists, but with robot units you can build, a bit like a Mr Handy so they won't take a pop unit to acquire. This may be too exploitable though, so it may just be like other specialists gained from buildings. Or perhaps as free specialists gained from buildings so again, no pop. required. Or maybe with some other negative that you have to offset, like unhappiness.)

Quaternary Goal: (I had to look that up!)

Lots of new Civic/Trait Specific Content.
Lots of new and magical buildings, improvements and units.
Special Improvements that Spawn Units under certain civics.
Like Robot Factories, Militia Guard Posts and Prison Compounds.

Synergies:
Leadership:

Military:

'Recruitment':

Economy:

Research:

Civic/Trait Tag Comparison List

Civic Synergy Colour Coded List

Specialists? You mean additional great people? You mean great robots? Robot are pretty great aren't they.

This is going to involve a complete reworking of all of the civics to be more unique and interesting, but it will also combine with the Traits system to create an Evolving Civic Effect.

Click to expand...

Does that mean civics won't be universally negative anymore?

No specialists as in citizen specialists like engineer, scientist, etc.

They may well end up with their own 'Great' Versions as well, from what I know so far, there is not that much work involved in making a great person type.

Well, chances are civics will all carry some kind of negative element, though they will be much more refined, as well as some of the negatives coming from other sources like the buildings they open up, etc.

Also a lot of negatives will come from 'bad combinations' so in some ways some negatives will be that you can't universally mix and match without paying a price.

Now we have far more things we can do than simply the initial serving of civic tags (that I played with first time around), so for example certain civics could become more negative over time, as whatever weakness or resentment fosters under the surface and forces you to devote ever increasing resources to stemming that decay.

Ok so I did some work on 'Synergy' matches for civics, (So far just on the first column 'Leadership')

I was having trouble coming up with +/- choices for Chieftain though.. and that lack of completeness is stalling me from moving forward...

Here is what I have so far:


These notes are really the very rough beginnings of building up the data for the concept, so don't think too hard about it.

obviously if it has a + it would get a bonus, and if it has a - it would have some negative effect.

So Chieftain is supposed to represent the idea of Power being concentrated in the hands of one 'Undisputed/Unquestionable' Ruler who is there by some 'Right'.
(Could be birthright/bloodline, could be ordination 'Chosen One', could be through prowess or achievement.)
But it represents a Centralised Power.

The trouble I am having is in defining it differently from Strength, giving it some functional differences in Synergy. (Unless it remains more or less the same synergies, they just benefit in different ways..)

Ok, I think I have it done. The difference between Chieftain and Strength, is:
Strength is physical power dominates physical weakness.
Chieftain is one seeking to dominate all, so the bonuses are about anything that one person can monopolise control of, or anything that keeps others from gaining more power. So Robot Army(and computers) are good because you can hold the ultimate passcode(Big Red Button) Militia is bad because if everyone has a weapon, they may decide they don't need to listen to you anymore.

Good Talk Everyone!

Eventually the orginasation of this will be that we will have Civic/Synergy Traits that will range from -5 to +5 (or perhaps -4/+4 with 0 being non-synergised [the max +/- would grow if we added more civic categories])

So every civic can gain traits over time, but if you chain a set of synergised traits together, you could get special +/- level traits on top of these.

This will take a while to figure out, lay out, and design/implement in the code!

Ok, I have completed the first attempt at laying out a synergies plan between all of the civics, long way to go still as this is just a first draft...

Lots of double checking and balancing to do to make sure the patterns make sense.

I need to experiment with some ways of laying these out together to get a good overview, going to try a flowchart software to see if that gives me a good graphical overview.

Ok, I have uploaded my first attempt at a list of synergy combinations for civics, I am still trying to work out the best way to display it though.

Obviously green means good and red means bad and black means neutral.

Again it is still my first quick run at it, so things may change to better balance or if the 'logic' behind the choices changes.

I have also added in all the new specialists from my list (plus a shaman) so that I can start plugging those into various civics as well.

I still need to make buttons for them, and make their text strings.

I am currently about half way through maing my first passover of the civics, to change them.

One thing I need to try and lay out in some way, is what takes only exist for civics, and what tags only exist for traits. As this will effect the design of what has to be in civics from the start, and what can be moved to evolving traits.

So for anyone following along at home, I found a nifty little website for comparing lists of things, so I now have a file that compares traits and civics to see what we can and can't do in each!

The good news from this is that there are only 6 tags which can only be done via civics!



And when you look at it, it is actually only the bottom 3!

The other fun thing is that now that traits and civics can be linked, we can influnce 29 new things via the trait system!

Which means I really can strip down the civics to almost nothing if we want to and let all the positive/negative effects appear over time as each civic 'beds in' to society.

I would have to make somthing in their pedia entries that tells about their increasing side effects though, so the player isn't too blindsided.. or maybe they should be. The wasteland being a harsh and unforgiving place!

For anyone other than me that reads these posts, I just had the dubious enjoyment of dodging the potential collapse of all my plans for civics!

For a brief period of time this morning as I was trying to begin the first tentative steps of learning/implementing my first dynamic trait, I thought I had worryingly discovered that the way points were added to traits were massively limited, and that many of the tags were not usuable, without one of a few 'events' occuring, due to the way the the New Traithooks system archid made worked, thinking that it only allowed points to be gained in a limted set of circumstances like when something was built, or a city was captured.

I thought Oh no!!! All my plans have collapsed, and archid isn't here to help me fix it!!

Fortunately I discovered after digging in the source code, that Archid had actually made the Traithook I needed, it just wasn't documented in the XML!

So phew, now we can add trait points at the end of the turn if all of the prereq tag conditions are met. So everything is good!

Unfortunately, it currently appears that a lot of the the 'pedia auto documentation' for trait effects is not working, or not working right or has gone funny, so I may have to try and find a slightly hackey way to display info for those until someone clever like archid comes back around to help me fix it.

To do that I need to figure out where the Traits are getting their pedia text from, as there are no TXT_STRINGS for it in the trait files... so I made need to look at bts, and see if it has them in there to be pinched or some other strangeness, though I have a bad feeling it may not be straight forward or standard in the way that it works... it may be a platy pedia thing, I don't know yet..

EDIT: Ok this uses a clever python widget to build the text string, and I found the file that holds them, so it is back to being able to modify it as a standard text issue.

So anyway. Made a dummy 'Civic Trait' to test the system I want to use, and it appears to work, I just need to spend more time learning all the finer points of the new Dyn Traits system by Archid.

I am still going through and redefing all the current Civics, so that when you first choose it there will be far fewer effects, and most of the effects will come from subsequent Trait gains.

This will mean the civics screen will look a lot different, with far fewer effects and more 'descriptions' of what the Civic will do over time. This will hopefully help to reduce information overload on that screen, the hard part of that now will be helping the player to have and sense and 'know' what state their empire is in and what effects are being applied to it. That is very much in 'the learning how not even design stage' phase of things though.

The more I look and think about all this the more excited I get, I just wish I had some help in doing it all, as it is going to be a pretty massive task of xml additions!

On we go!

Once again for anyone following along at home.

I have added in text strings for all of the current new specialists, I still need to add custom art for them as well as making/editing buildings to 'house' them in cities. A lot of buildings are already suitable, I just need to add in the relevant tags and numbers to them.

This may see some shifting in building stats, whereby they produce less as a building, and instead the 'stats' will come from how many specialists you decide to 'employ' there.

I have added in the 'entry templates' for level 1 civic traits. These will be an 'upgrade' to each civic after you have been using it for a while and it has 'bedded in' to society.

Currently they don't really do anything (they all uniformly boost pillage income as that was the trait I used to make them) So I need to go through and add in all of the extra abilities I want that civic to have, as well as porting over any other civic effects that are 'cluttering up' the civics screen to make that as neat and digestable as possible.

One cool thing I have learnt is how to add 'links' to pedia entries in text strings, so I can add a link to all of the 'stages' of civic upgrades into the civic screen. Unfortunately the traits effect display in pedia is not great at the minute, so I will in some way have to write all the effects of a trait manually into the pedia, so this may look a bit hacky unless/until I can figure out all the the text keys for the various icons. etc. that Civ uses for things. (Bread, Hammers, Beakers, etc.) Or someone comes along to fix/build better UI code for these things.

The next update is going to be amazing! The synergy and evolution of civics will greatly help in creating specialization and atmosphere and I can't wait to see what you do with these mechanics. Hopefully I'll have more time to play when you release the next version!

Made some nice progress today,

Added in lots of specialists to buildings. (about half way need to start the vault buildings next)

Added in a cook and new citizen specialist and converted the old citizen to homeless people.

Added quick icons for the new specialists.

Need to see if I can add some 'space' between the specialist icons on the city screen as they have become a bit squashed.

Ok for those following along at home!

I have finished adding more specialists to the buildings. (All the Vault ones and misc.) These will probably need more balancing (as I just made it up off the top of my head) and I may have missed a few specialist entries. (I need to go through and tally up the total number of specialists of each type you can get if you build all available buildings, to figure out the total 'employable' population number. This of course will all change again when I add new buildings, so I won't think too hard about this!)

I have added in some bits to make sure that you cannot have 2 Civic Traits from the same category active at the same time, so you should start losing points to all others in a category when you adopt a new civic, and if you gain a new civic trait it will remove any trait from the same category.

I am still working through the planning of what the civic traits will actually do, but we chip, chip away!