Things we'd like to see in MOO2Civ

I would like to see every civ from MoO II duplicated if possible. That will give us loads of techs and a far more authentic feel.
 
I am planning to start my own thread, but I have one more question before I start the project. Do you know if there is a limit on technologies? Making this sort of a tech tree will put around 200 technologies in the game, possibly more.

There's no limit like this. Rise of Mankind has more than 200 technologies, iirc.
But gameplaywise, i think, that's too much.
 
I don't know where to ask this, so I'll put it here.

I noticed that there are techs that increase sight over water in the current Moo2Civ tech tree, like the original plan was to use water as space or something, but it appears that tundra got used as space instead.

Does anybody know why he used tundra instead of creating a new terrain type? Or if we used water instead of space would the +1 sight range work? That would be extremely helpful in fixing the swarming barbarians problem because there would be fewer tiles for them to spawn on.

Also, does all the original civ data that isn't used in this mod (like plains and grass) need to be in the xml files? Will that help the game run faster by removing it or is it needed somehow?
 
If I had to guess, I would say that tundra was used precisely to facilitate barbarian spawning.
 
I don't know where to ask this, so I'll put it here.

I noticed that there are techs that increase sight over water in the current Moo2Civ tech tree, like the original plan was to use water as space or something, but it appears that tundra got used as space instead.

Does anybody know why he used tundra instead of creating a new terrain type? Or if we used water instead of space would the +1 sight range work? That would be extremely helpful in fixing the swarming barbarians problem because there would be fewer tiles for them to spawn on.

The +1 sight across water is unedited text (there's no water used). Other than that, I don't know...
 
If I had to guess, I would say that tundra was used precisely to facilitate barbarian spawning.
The tundra would make sense on the barbarians, they don't seem to spawn much in the ocean in vanilla civ, if they did their ships would swarm!

The +1 sight across water is unedited text (there's no water used). Other than that, I don't know...
The technology xmls include the ability to give a player +1 sight across water. Each new sensor tech gives the bonus. Unfortunately in the XML it is coded as water, so I was just wondering if there was some sort of python code or schema thing that could be changed to make it tundra instead of water that gets the sight bonus.

Or, an easier fix might be to enhance a cities culture each time a sensor tech is researched and we could just use culture as sensor range in this mod. What do you think of that method?
 
I meant that "+1 sight across water" simply translates to +1 visibility (I've left out a couple of text file edits in 5.0 Beta), so it doesn't really needs fixing.

As for using Culture as a sensor replacement: Culture already works that way, but it would deprive ships of increased sensor range (apart from the +1 sight tech there are sensor promotions which increase visibility).
 
Thought of something else to include (actually thought of it quite a while back, but there you go): implementing the Heroes from MOO II as Great People. (You know, Ship's Captains, Administrators and the like.) The main problem - apart from reintroducing the remaining Great People - is icons and buttons with appropriate pics (which is why I didn't mention it earlier, as I have no experience with that).

EDIT: Arakhor already provided a leader list in post # 26, so that's a good starting point.
 
Thought of something else to include (actually thought of it quite a while back, but there you go): implementing the Heroes from MOO II as Great People. (You know, Ship's Captains, Administrators and the like.) The main problem - apart from reintroducing the remaining Great People - is icons and buttons with appropriate pics (which is why I didn't mention it earlier, as I have no experience with that).

That's a good implementation of the Moo2 leaders in my opinion.
 
Not only is it a good idea, I also provided you with a long list for all the six types of Great Leader.
 
Firstly, let me congratulate on a good idea for a mod and the original makers of the graphical design, solar system implementation. Love the chance of really getting to play MOO2Civ in the future.

I just had a thought about stealth. In Civ4 you have submarines and units that can see submarines. These are not the same as units that can see other stealth units, or are they?

If there are special cases where some unit can see certain units from stealth only, there's a chance to get more variation in stealth types.

On to the suggestions I had in mind... I do think you have also thought of most, just didn't find myself searching enough. I also don't have much modding experience, I've just toddled around the SDKs a bit, and have some experience in game programming so far :)

Exploration

Exploring is too easy, there needs to be a range limiter that doesn't allow venturing off too far, or the unit might never get back home. A problem with Civ4-mechanics ofc, but thinking of how aircrafts re-base, or do recons, there could be similar commands that included travel time or something. For starters, it could be just that the unit is unavailable for the duration of the journey taken.

Culture could be used as fuel range in a way, but wouldn't make use of extended fuel cells at all. Would also mean redesigning culture usage in the mod.

Ship desiging and refitting

I find the lack of ship designing disturbing. This is supposed to be a spiritual descendant to MOO2, and ship design was important in it. This is ofc countered somewhat with promotions, but the fact that units gain experience in combat and get new promotions from it feels wrong: you don't get mass drivers in a ship that just blew up some random ship in the middle of nowhere.

Maybe the ships would need to be launched from space dock in order to be usable, and they would lose experience points, and a promotion that would allow space dock upgrade promotions. Let me better explain what I had in mind:

A ship is built in a space dock. It is immobile and can not defend or attack, but it has a set number of experience points to be spent, and a promotion called "in space dock". This would give access to ship equipment promotions.

A player chooses what the unit has, and then activates a command that launches the ship from space dock, removes the experience points, resets the level, but keeps the given promotions as free promotions, removes "in space dock" promotion and adds a promotion named "launched" which would be required for any ship crew experience promotions etc.

Complex, but not too bad from a programmers perspective. Refitting should also be possible IMO, but I don't have many good ideas for that. Maybe something to exchange existing promotions to others with increasing cost to build or buy, while retaining the prerequisite hierarchy.

Hope my ranting helps :)
 
Thank you, Paranox, for some excellent thoughts. It so happens CyberChrist is working on a redo of exploration and ship design along the lines you suggest. (Can't say when it'll be done though; last news was it's about 60% done - that was a few weeks back. I hope he starts a thread on it when his work nears completion.)

As for ship refitting, that's indeed a bit harder to do: I for one wouldn't know how to go about it... (To be true, when I first saw the way promotions are supposed to represent MOO ship design, I was a bit disappointed, being used to the MOO ship building concept.)

If you have some thoughts on how improvements (like the ones you're suggesting) could be implented practically, please do not hesitate to post about it - help is always welcome!
 
Planetfall has a set of promotions sort of like you describe (Where a unit gets one set of promotions when built, no matter how much experience it has, than once these are chosen, it goes back to the regular set of promotions)

It still would need some adjustments to work for refits, though, and I'm not sure how it works or which strategy would take less time ot add successfully.
 
Exploration
I saw a mod somewhere that limited units to a certain distance outside of your culture (modified by technology I think, or maybe it was era) that could work just like the MoO system but I don't recall what it was called.

Ship desiging and refitting
The barbarians scenario has a screen for buying promotions for units that could also work for a MoO type game.
 
Maybe something like the following could work:

Technology: Laser Cannon, Mass Driver, Nuclear Drive, Fusion Drive, Class I Shield, Nuclear Missiles, Electronic Computer

1. You build an empty ship hull of size Destroyer. It has no equipment at all at first, and so it's immobile and has zero strength. It appears in the solar system still.
2. The unit gets 6 promotions due to certain level of ship construction tech and infrastructure.
3. You choose Mass Driver I, Mass Driver II, Nuclear Drive, Fusion Drive, Electronic Computer, Class I shield.
4. Now you have a fast and somewhat hard hitting destroyer class ship.

The point here would be to determine by some way the number of promotions available. Technology can unlock certain promotions, or allow further levels of some promotion. There could also be free promotions from technology (like armor) and racial traits. Also, there would need to be some research and testing to get a good assortment of promotions to represent equipment well enough.

If possible, there should be an additional cost to use these promotions. I don't think it's normally possible to use production points for the promotions this way, unless the unit can be sent back to queue somehow. I think it's unlikely to work.

Another way to do this, but I don't like it as much due to civ mechanics, is to create components separately, as small build projects, and add them to ship unit one by one like great generals. This would emulate MOO2-style ship building closely enough, but the problem is that you can't build more than one at a time, so creating small ships with diverse equipment is too slow. Unless there were some scripts to alleviate this problem.
 
One thing I keep forgetting when I think of new ideas is how will the AI use this? So things need to still be similar to it's standard operation. If there were promotions that were only available while in a city (heavy equipment) that would mimic designing or refitting a ship and the AI would understand it. Although the AI wouldn't save promotions until it got home because it always uses them right away. Another thing that might be good is allow the heavy equipment promotions if the ship is on the same tile as unit with a repair bay promotion provided that promotion was restricted to starbases or the biggest ships, which I think it should.
 
Exploration
I saw a mod somewhere that limited units to a certain distance outside of your culture (modified by technology I think, or maybe it was era) that could work just like the MoO system but I don't recall what it was called.

You mean this here. I don't recommend to use it, because it massivly decreases the performance, and the AI will not be able to handle it really right.
But to see a SDK implementation would be :cool:.
 
I personally would be interested in seeing a limit on air units per city like vanilla BTS does. Then the fighter garrison could increase that capacity. Otherwise cities become rather unstoppable when a user can produce a bomber per turn and stack 50 of them on one star.

To change the default capcity for stars, this needs to be added to the globaldefines file (I believe it's called GlobalDefinesAlt.xml).

<Define>
<DefineName>CITY_AIR_UNIT_CAPACITY</DefineName>
<iDefineIntVal>10</iDefineIntVal>
</Define>

I think the base capacity should be 10 with an additional 10 from the fighter garrison because titans each carry 3 fighters and it would only take 4 titans to take out 10 defensive fighters. Or we could set the base value to 0 and set the garrison value to 20 so it will be more like MoO2?

I can make the change if you'd like. I'll just include GlobalDefinesAlt.xml in the list of updated files I'll send when I finish modding the tech tree.
 
Wow! Sure, go right ahead. :D

The Fighter Garrison should actually be 1 of 2 prereqs for building fighters (the other being the necessary tech), so base value should indeed be zero.*

But I don't agree on the fighter limit for 2 reasons:

- star systems do not equal cities (and say 10 max fighters per star system seems not very realistic)
- fighters can damage ships, but rarely take them out (for instance 1-2 Titans with accompanying Destroyers - even without additional promotions - have a pretty good interception chance against fighters).

* The same (as has been mentioned) goes for missiles: base system value should be (and is, AFAIK) zero until either a starbase or a Missile Base is built (because either can build missiles).
 
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