Final Frontier Mod planning

[GeoModder]

Originally Posted by Mylon

I think the roads mechanic will stay. It allows an empire to move it's newly built ships from the fringes to the forefront fairly quickly relative to an enemy's advancement.

I think some sort of teleport gate facility in your cities/systems would be the quickest way to transport existing units around. But this sounds of course high-tech. Perhaps a way to 'assign' newly constructed units instantly to a target system of the player could be implemented? Think of it as that parts of the ship to be are transported to the target system and locally assembled into the ship.

The main reason I don't like 'roads' in space is because any passing enemy ship or pirate can disable your connection.

[Andrew_Jay]

Perhaps easiest just to code some kind of movement bonus for when inside your own borders.

Of course, I think for connections to remain, the terrain system will need to be overhauled. Right now, space is 'land' - you'd want space to be water so that trade can be conducted, and for resources to act like fish once you but an extractor on them.

[Zuul]

Finally made a first test pic of the new promotion icon style. Do you like it? Should I change something?
Maybe a bit lighter. Should I continue this style with the rest of the icons?

Edit: Oki added a lighter version:

[Mylon]

The lighter icon looks sweet. I'm looking forward to seeing the rest of the set.

Sorry I've been so scant. I just upgraded my computer and I've been slowly migrating everything over.

[Mylon]

Well, I finally got off my rear and started doing some programming but I've run into a snag. Previously, I had made a hook to call Python to handle a function to kill all units in the defending tile during combat, but that crashed the game. But damaging the units to 100% resolves everything just peachy. Go figure. Anyway, I tried recreating this function in Python, but nothing seems to happen. No python exception. The combat starts, but no one takes damage and the attacker eventually withdraws. Trying to figure out what I'm doing wrong is frustrating. I could do this using linked lists in C++, but I would rather not.

[Thinker19930602]

I have a thread (link in signature) where some pretty good ideas have been suggested. You should check it out and I'd be honored if you post on it, Mylon. The ideas and suggestions are too numerous to post here.

[Mylon]

To be fair, the game is ultimately really shallow. I've already made a few comments in your thread (back in page 2), but one of the first things I intend to address is the simplistic combat system that plagues all Civ games. I don't feel comfortable doing this in c++, however, and want to do this part in Python. But it looks like I will have to hack something together because my attempt to add a new c++ to Python function call did not work.

[cephalo]

One thing I'd like to see different is the end game. Getting the battleship tech to build my first battleship is fun, but knowing that I will eventually need battleship 2, 3, 4 etc. is not enough to keep me excited.

The nature and atmosphere of combat should change in some way as the civs progress in tech. Adding a new greek letter and some strength points doesn't really change anything from a story-telling point of view.

One thing that was very cool about MOO was that there were some radical new technologies that really changed the strategic landscape once you first encountered them.

[Thinker19930602]

Originally Posted by Mylon

To be fair, the game is ultimately really shallow. I've already made a few comments in your thread (back in page 2), but one of the first things I intend to address is the simplistic combat system that plagues all Civ games. I don't feel comfortable doing this in c++, however, and want to do this part in Python. But it looks like I will have to hack something together because my attempt to add a new c++ to Python function call did not work.

Thanks for the posts on my thread. your welcome to use any ideas on my thread, as long as you give recognition (some people are a bit sensitive). I agree with you that the combat system is a tad simplistic, but i would like to caution you to not overcomplicate it.

[Mylon]

Take a look at the combat system detailed towards the bottom of page 1 of this thread and you tell me. If you don't want to read all of it, the basics are this:

Ships have 3 kinds of weapons, and take turns firing their weapons. When a hit is made, the ship has a chance of loosing a component (engines, a weapon, armor, or the "bridge" which disables the ship except for basic movement). In this way ships are more likely to be crippled than blown up. And they all fire as a fleet. None of this one-on-one stuff.

[cephalo]

Originally Posted by Mylon

Take a look at the combat system detailed towards the bottom of page 1 of this thread and you tell me. If you don't want to read all of it, the basics are this:

Ships have 3 kinds of weapons, and take turns firing their weapons. When a hit is made, the ship has a chance of loosing a component (engines, a weapon, armor, or the "bridge" which disables the ship except for basic movement). In this way ships are more likely to be crippled than blown up. And they all fire as a fleet. None of this one-on-one stuff.

If you could pull that stuff off it would be very cool. The most important game for the player is the first game. Each time a new technology is used against a player that first time they play, it should be surprising and almost, but not quite, seem unfair. If they feel like they don't know what the future has in store for them, they'll be having fun.

[Thinker19930602]

Originally Posted by Mylon

Take a look at the combat system detailed towards the bottom of page 1 of this thread and you tell me. If you don't want to read all of it, the basics are this:

Ships have 3 kinds of weapons, and take turns firing their weapons. When a hit is made, the ship has a chance of loosing a component (engines, a weapon, armor, or the "bridge" which disables the ship except for basic movement). In this way ships are more likely to be crippled than blown up. And they all fire as a fleet. None of this one-on-one stuff.

If you can pull it off, it would be awsome. Do you think you can overhaul the squadron (bomber, fighter, etc.) combat mechanics too?

[Mylon]

As I have it re-imagined, squadrons have no engine capabilities on their own. They participate in combat, but cannot make strikes and such on their own. Fighters will be squad of 3-5 fighters or bombers and damage will possibly destroy one of the craft, but besides that will not have individual components like ships will. Fighters do well versus small ships and other strike craft, while bombers do well versus large craft.

[keldath]

hey mylon,

say,
do you know how to make units?

[Mylon]

Make units? If you're referring to the artwork, then no. But it wouldn't be too hard to add a unit in using XML.

[JEELEN]

Not too difficult? Woodelf just released 2 space ship models I'd like included in MOO2Civ. Could you explain how that's done (or is there a thread describing this)?

[Mylon]

Check the documentation with the units. See if they provide the paths and such to use for the art info. The easiest way to create a unit is to copy and paste the XML entry for another unit and backtrack some of the tidbits, like the source of the texts (for unit name) or the art (for the model).

[JEELEN]

OK, thanks!

[Mylon]

Hey, actual progress to report!

I've gotten the design stage of ship building done and a skeleton of a combat engine done (just another rehash of "kill everything in defending tile and award all attacking units 1 xp"). The ship design was a bit difficult, but now I'll start adding in the basic promotions (I'll stick to one weapon type for now) and their damaged versions.

The next step is to figure out how to arrange everything in memory. There's going to be a lot of nested lists. Like, I expect it'll be something on the order of AttackerList [ [ Ship, Initiative, [components? (this could be generated dynamically instead of stored)]], [], ...] So that AttackerList[0].[1] will return the initiative value of the first unit of the attacker list. I'm trying to think if python dicts would be helpful in this instance, but I do not think so, given how everything will be fairly static and I can resort to using fixed index calls instead of dynamic ones.

[Mylon]

I've made huge progress in the combat engine. Now, when one unit attacks another, all units get a shot at the other stack. Right now combat only lasts for 1 round and doesn't actually use any ship stats, but that will come shortly.

I added in a new attribute to the XML instead of the weird round-about way I was doing things, so now there's an attribute that the game will check for to keep undesigned ships from acquiring exp promotions and designed ships from acquiring components. Next is to redo the XML file to mark the appropriate promotions as being components and make a broken version of each. Also, I'll need to add a way to prevent units from being fired on once they are dead: as I'm not iterating over the actual lists of units during the part where they will be fired upon, there shouldn't be any problem with deleting them from the list.

I also have to figure out how to mark the starting unit (or units) as being under design, so they get the proper treatment in combat.

With any luck I'll be able to release a version of the combat engine for scrutiny. I might even try developing a version for vanilla Civ4, though it won't quite be as deep (following the rock-paper-scissors trend already built in rather than the component model I'm using for Frontier Awaits).