[WIP] The Hand Of History

Zebra 9

Emperor
Joined
May 17, 2006
Messages
1,554
Location
Middle of Cyberspace
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[img=right]http://forums.civfanatics.com/uploads/91501/IMG1.gif[/img]
Defined Objective
My objective with this MOD is to increase the length of all of the eras, and increase the overall strategy required to play the game. I plan to acomplish this by the addition of new units, technologies, buildings, and missions. I want to increase the stratiegic importance of navies and airforces. I will also tweak the AI abilities in many areas, not only to give the AI the ability to use new missions but also to make the game harder to win on all difficulty levels. Another thing I want to do is change the current UU system to work on a sort of privledge system. Another thing I would like to do would be to have civ specific traits, such as seafaring, agricultural, or scientific. I will also add the Stone Age, an era when your people have very little knowledge of the world around them.

What I Want To Do
First I want to tackle the job of increasing the overall game length. I would much prefer it if I could have a very long game speed. Now to prevent the game from being too dragged out I will add era victories, and give cities the ability to build more then one of each building type. I will also make it possible for you to fail to understand a technology, you might have to develope it multiple times before you actually understand the technology. I want to set it so that GPs, tech trading, goody huts, and free technologies are automaticly understood. I will also put a safe guard to prevent the possibility that a civ can't get a tech because they can't understand it, so it will increase the chance of understanding the tech every time you fail to understand it. I will also add new buildings and units to increase the number of things a city can build.

[img=left]http://forums.civfanatics.com/uploads/91501/IMG6.gif[/img] I also want to increase the importance of your navy and airforce. I intend to make the airforce more important by adding more airplanes and helicopters, as well as making it possible to land aircraft outside of your borders on airports. I will also give the ability to paratroop many different types of units into enemy territory. I want to make this paratrooper system work differently then the one in Civ III (I believe that the paratrooper system in BtS will be the same as Civ III's). Instead of the unit that is to be paratrooped having a paratrooper mission I want you to have to load him onto an airplane or helicopter, then and only then will the airplane or helicopter have the paratroop mission enabled. Using this mission will be the same as bombing a city, a grid will display where you can paratroop to and clicking on any plot inside of the grid will cause the loaded units to be paratrooped to that plot. I also want to add a stratigic bombing raid type mission that would allow your aircraft to target a preselected building/unit/improvement. Now to make navies more important, I will increase the number of ship types that are in game. These new ships will be added to all eras, and some will have special requirements to be built. For instance I want to add a Super Carrier capable of carrying more aircraft and having a higher defense, this carrier will require you to have at least 1 battleship, 2 destroyers, 2 transports, 4 subs, and 1 fully loaded aircraft carrier, along with 5 fighters/jets that are not already loaded. I also want ships to have the ability to bombard instalations or units.

Depending on how well the AI is in BtS I will tweak the AI so that they better understand how to fight wars, and program them so that they don't do those silly moves that they currently do (like moving a unit between 2 plots), and anything else that I find would be useful to change.

Because I want this MOD to allow you to write your own history I would much rather the UUs work on a system of priviledges. To accomplish this I will make it so that you must earn your UU from combat. I will also possible for a civ to be either Civilized or Barbaric, and some units will be unique to the barbaric civs and others unique to the civilized civs, and even some UUs will be unique to the barbaric and civilized civs. Now once you adopt a state religion that was founded by a civilized civ you might become civilized, the same goes for religions founded by barbaric civs. Now some of you are probably wondering how the game determines who is barbaric and who is civilized at the beginning of the game, well human players will get to pick which one they want to be and the AI will have their's chosen randomly.

The civ specific traits will be given out when a civ builds their first city. I currently have 3 traits that I am going to use, Seafaring, Agricultural, and Scientific. Seafaring will be given if the majority of plots and resources are coastal, Agricultural will be given if the majority of plots are grassland or plains, or have either corn or wheat, if neither of the previous 2 are selected or the majority of plots are deser or tundra, or there is the gold resource, the civ will be scientific. These traits have special early game bonuses. Seafaring will place a bonus Fish or Clam resource and when the civ developes fishing they recieve a free fishing boat. Agricultural will place a bonus Corn or Wheat resource, and when the civ developes Agriculture they recieve a free worker. Finally Scientific civs will recieve a free academy when they develope writing.

During the Stone Age you can only work on one technology, but, this technology can't be developed until you build the Wise One's House. Now the Wise One's House can only be built by the new GP, The Wise One. Every turn the game does a check to see if it should spawn The Wise One in one of your cities, as the game progresses the chance of receiving The Wise One increases. He will come somtime in the first 20-30 turns of the game.
 
To Do
  1. Get The Failable Technologies System Working
  2. Add Civ Specific Traits (Just Need To Get The SDK Compiled)
  3. Add Barbaric And Civilized Civ Abilities (Just Need To Get The SDK Compiled)
  4. Add New UU System (Done) (Needs To Be Updated)
  5. Add Stone Age (Just Needs Balancing) (Making Changes)
  6. Add New Ships And Aircraft
  7. Create Paratrooper, Bombard, and Stratigic Bombing Missions
  8. Dream Up A Way To Do UBs
Future Things To Dream About
  1. Balancing All Units
  2. Adding Space Age
  3. Adding Space Age Units
Need Help With
  1. SDK (Shqype)
  2. Graphics
  3. Ideas (Vrenir, Shqype)
 
Team
  • Me
  • Vrenir (Ideas)
  • Shqype (SDK Compiling, Ideas, Secondary Python)
  • Dom Pedro II (Looking at my C++ Code)
  • Harewood (Play Testing)
  • The Navy SEAL (XML)
Credits
  • Strategyonly for 33% of my inspiration
  • Cotdamn for helping with compiling the SDK
  • Dale for the ranged bombard
  • TheLopez for scriptable traits
  • the civfanatics website and all of it's members for another 33% of my inspiration
  • Firaxis games
    • For making this totaly awsome game
    • For 33% of my inspiration
  • And of course I'm helping and for my 1% of inspiration
Images are from Compton's Interactive Encyclopedia copy right 2000
 
Sounds ambitious and cool. Good luck. Luckily there are tons of graphics out there already for you to borrow.
 
Yea most of it is done, but it is with CCCP (I don't want to have to deal w/ my million of bugs plus any bugs that manage to slip into the CCCP).
 
Cool Zebra 9, I wish you the best of luck in this endeavor. :)
 
There's some really good stuff here. I especially like the ideas of starting location-based advantages, earned UUs, and failed research projects. Fixing things like paradropping is also never a bad thing for the game.

The Barbaric vs. Civilized thing intrigues me, though I wonder if there might be a better way to categorize them as it seems pretty-well a Romans and Greeks vs. Celts and Vikings thing the way it is (possibly it could be by large culture groups: European, Mediteranian, East Asian, African, American). That way, you can get areas like Europe becoming more Romanized and less Norse etc. based upon their embrace of religions and other cultural values.

I would also possibly rename some of the starting location traits. Agricultural is good, but Coastal might work better than Seafaring, and something else might fit the mountain/desert/hills people more than Scientific. What I mean is that the other two benefit traits are geared toward resources and the type of economic base a society in that environment would develop. Though monks and other thinkers were often reclusive in mountainous areas, it seems that the most sense would be to give them some sort of industrial bonus, perhaps a free forge at some point. That way, all three are specialized, but not locked into a game strategy by their location; a coastal could still easily gear themselves toward science more than an agricultural or industrial should they choose. That's my three cents anyway; take it or leave it.

Good work though; I am impressed to say the least.
 
Sounds cool! :goodjob:

Hope you get it all figured out!

GM
 
I'll think about those suggestions Vrenir.
The Barbaric vs. Civilized thing intrigues me, though I wonder if there might be a better way to categorize them as it seems pretty-well a Romans and Greeks vs. Celts and Vikings thing the way it is (possibly it could be by large culture groups: European, Mediteranian, East Asian, African, American). That way, you can get areas like Europe becoming more Romanized and less Norse etc. based upon their embrace of religions and other cultural values.
I'm definatly thinking of doing that.
 
An idea for your research system, use the Master of Orion 1 system. In that system you have to accumulate the full cost of the tech first and then you continue to accumulate points, each turn theirs a roll to discover the tech, the chance of discovery is ( X - Y ) / Y. Ware X is your accumulated points and Y is the techs cost. Thus when you have double the base cost your at 100% chance to get the tech.

It would also be rather simple to program
 
Added Vrenir as an ideas person. I'm hoping that between the 2 of us we can make the most awsome MOD for BtS. :thumbsup: :trophy:
 
This looks like an excellent piece of work. Two things particularly caught my eye: one, you plan to add the Stone Age. Many cheers to you for doing this. I always felt the game suffered from a boring ancient era (before the wonder/conquest rush begins) and a bad late era. Looks like you will solve that. :cheers:

I also noticed you plan to implement airbases. I've been trying to figure out how to implement them for some time now, so I hope you can finally get it to work properly. ww2commander was also working on it but he took a much different approach, but still to no avail. This is a feature badly needed.
 
I'll be paying attention. This sounds pretty interesting. Good luck!
 
I'm goint to try and do my best, by only putting what I think needs to go in (no extras), and keeping it simple. :thumbsup:
 
Hopfully soon. I just need to get the SDK compiled, then I need to add the changes to the python so it all works.
 
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