The Kuriotates

Good ideas Chalid I was thinking something like that.

What if each of the 3 kuriotates cities could build "Economic Hub". that would give 3 trade routes and +25% trade route yeild.

Also could the kuriotates palace give +1 trade route?

Have any of you ever played Europa Universalis II? I ws think about the difference between a tradiing post and a settlement in the game.
What if there were two types of non-cities that the Kuriotates could build? One a settlement--Like a small city that grew slowly and gave a little production and such.
The other a trading post--No growth but normal trade routes and able to build an improvement to increase trade route yeild.

What do you think?

Chalid said:

I have a solution for your upgrading (in fact it is even needed and you can make the first cities settements as well)

I'll linke the isSprawling of the city to a buildingattribute i will shortly introduce (so not the civ decides if a city is sprawling but the buildings built there.) Obviosly the kuriotate palace would switch a city to be sprawling as well as a very cheap national wonder (two buildable). This way we can also allow scaling with map size.
ill export isSprawling of the building to Phython so you can check this for changing settlements.

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Its not a problem, I don't need a new attribute on the buildings and the upgrading is easy to do, I just havent added it yet. It can all be done in python without any SDK changes.

We just need the SDK to increase the culture borders for civs with the sprawling trait and to allow cities to work the 3rd plot ring (how is this going to work in the city screen?).

Kael said:

Its not a problem, I don't need a new attribute on the buildings and the upgrading is easy to do, I just havent added it yet. It can all be done in python without any SDK changes.

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I need the building attribute to tell the city it, that has an third ring, as there are a lot of things that have to be done when a city switches from 2 rings to 3 rings and the other way round. With the building i can do all this dynamically and if its a national building it will work automatical when the city is conquered. Without the building you will have to add many many Python changes and might still miss something....

We just need the SDK to increase the culture borders for civs with the sprawling trait and to allow cities to work the 3rd plot ring (how is this going to work in the city screen?).

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For these things ill add a new attribute to the leader trait (as it might be ckecked very often per turn and city its better than going via the TRAIT_NAME). The third ring is visible in standard cities already but i will change the city zoom distance for civs with sprawling as the three upper tiles can not be accessed. The culture thing will be done thereafter but query the leader trait - attribute as well (this time not so oftern but several ten times a turn for sure...).

Just an small report:
Its working already (the 3rd ring ~ 50-100 SDk changes...) just some things to fix and to make sure all effects are considered correctly (at the moment the white rings for working plots are not shown in the third ring and the feature health might not be calculated correctly, and maybe still some unfound issues on changing from two to three rings and back.)

Shall we allow the Kuriotates to build all buildings that require more than three of one kind of other buildings to built them with just 3 of them?
Its not difficult any more ...

Build them with 3 i say.

That sounds fair. I can't wait to try these guys out!

They are really difficult to play... You never know on which of those 36 plots to set your lone worker... ....

I hope the worker isn't a national unit with a max of 1!

woodelf said:

I hope the worker isn't a national unit with a max of 1!

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I thought of the lone city population point you have at the beginning.. even with three peoples working on tiles the city looks really really empty. I"ll post some screenies this evening

Ah, the choices of which tile to be worked. That must be comical.

What about a civic that frees up another city for them down the road? Or something that allows them to get to 4 eventually?

I don't think so, that would be too good. Unless you wanted to connect it to the armeggedon counter, and once it reaches a certain point the kuriotates can start expanding.

I just had anotehr idea for settlements. How about giving them 50% production, 50 %Commerce -40% maintaince
but letting them work only the 8 inner tiles (kind of inverse sprawling). Could be set up with my code without greater problems (i will only have to change few lines).
This would be a nice symmetry.

I like it.

I like it too.

I'm not sure I like it. I feel that the production focus should be entirely on the 3 main cities, colonies should really only be good for resources. The change might make the Kuriotates too powerful, as colonies do not have any maintenance costs either.

However, I could perhaps see reverse sprawling being used for some other civ, which would be able to spread far and wide thanks to no maintenance, but whose cities would be quite limited.

What about a mechanic for the Hippus? I think of them as a spreadout nomadic civ, and this would work nicely for them i think.

Actually i would give some (reduced maintaince to the inverse sprawling cities). But exactly that the settlements as they are now implemented have not production is what bugges me. Players will get along with that very well. But AI produces the defenders in the cities it wants to defend (it does produce additional defenders sometimes but that is very seldom the case) so the settlements of an Kuriotate AI civ will be mostly undefended if they cannot built defenders themselves. And with 8 Tiles and half production you will never get really much anyway (especially if you cannot build most of the buildings which is the case for settlements if i understood Kael correctly - i would allow only archery ranges/stabels - whatever centaurs need and units)
The best production you can get will be something like 6 Hammers (4 Grassland Farms + 4 Grassland Hill/Mines). That will not make you a big army...

And as i said i would like settlements to pay upkeep as otherwise its to easy to keep the enemy confirmed by your culture (place a settlement somewhere near him and put a great bard there and some defenders there. This would allow you to simple make an entire island unavailable for the AI)


Oh and here is a question for Kael. How do you decide which cities get your core cities? Can a player set it or will it be Random (The first three are obviosly the first ones you settle, but the ones tehreafter? - i mean after you loose one of them)
For the AI there is a function that evaluates the worth of a city. That one does not take the third ring into consideration yet. If you want to use it i'll have to adopt it accordingly.

Ok, I am convinced . I am too entangled in the ways of the player to understand the mysteries of AI, so here I bow to your wisdom
I thought you were going to allow buildings and make the settlements semi-cities for all intents and purposes, which I was against.

Its a difficult thing not to cripple the AI when you limit the player. We could of course alter the AI a bit, like forcing it to built abundand defensive units in its central Cities, but than it would not built Offensive forces anymore.

Unfortunateley there is one central problem with the Unit AI. I'd does not change it after it has built the unit. So if you built an Centaur and you need to defend your Cities you place him there. If you need to attack you can Move the Centaur to the front and attack with it. The AI does not do that. When an Centaur is built he will know exactly what to do. When he is an defender he will always only defend, never go to attack. Usually that works well, sometimes it does not.

Another Problem: when you kill off all offensive troops of an AI it will rebuild them very slow as it builds other UNITAI in teh same number. So It will end up with additional Attacker but with additional Defense and Pillaging units as well. But what did i want to say.. Hmm do not remember.. Just wanted to give an insight into some of the things i have to consider when "playing" the game form AIs perspective.

Chalid said:

Its a difficult thing not to cripple the AI when you limit the player. We could of course alter the AI a bit, like forcing it to built abundand defensive units in its central Cities, but than it would not built Offensive forces anymore.

Unfortunateley there is one central problem with the Unit AI. I'd does not change it after it has built the unit. So if you built an Centaur and you need to defend your Cities you place him there. If you need to attack you can Move the Centaur to the front and attack with it. The AI does not do that. When an Centaur is built he will know exactly what to do. When he is an defender he will always only defend, never go to attack. Usually that works well, sometimes it does not.

Another Problem: when you kill off all offensive troops of an AI it will rebuild them very slow as it builds other UNITAI in teh same number. So It will end up with additional Attacker but with additional Defense and Pillaging units as well. But what did i want to say.. Hmm do not remember.. Just wanted to give an insight into some of the things i have to consider when "playing" the game form AIs perspective.

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I like the fact that the settlements cant produce units at all. It really differentiates them from normal cities. Let me play a game against an AI kuriotate and see how it works.

If there are less than 3 main cities all of the settlements get an "Upgrade to City" option in their build list (functionally an Upgrade to City building that deletes the settlement building when it is created). I could block the AI so it can only do it in the most promosing settlement.