Features

UPDATED Dec 24th

In this thread post your ideas for features to include that will require some SDK/Python modifications. A number have been tossed around and I'm sure we all have others floating around in our heads... so let's get them all in one place.

This first post will be for modifications we have decided to make for sure.

Several of these will tie in with each other, and with other mods we are including. The way I see it (and I'm often wrong), our gameplay modifications seem to be falling into two categories; war, and economics.

To be included so far:

Economics:

• Trade Organizations
• Deficit Spending- Includes IMF rating/screen.
• Corporation changes
• Universal Oil/Quantitative Oil/Oil Storage
• Increased/improved AI lending

War:

• War Escalation
• Asymmetric warfare- Plus page two of this thread.
• Ethnic Cleansing
• Arms Trade
• Weapons licenses- Already exists in the Blood and Iron mod.
• War crimes- nuclear first strikes, ethnic cleansing, and terrorism have similar effect to defying UN resolutions.
• Modifications to nuclear warfare- including seriously limiting the AI's tenancy to launch first strikes.

Doesn't fall into either category:

• Improved Statistics- Share your ideas for more additions!

I'll try to keep an updated master list in this post, so let me know what I am forgetting.

We also want to make sure that we don't start working on anything that is already covered by existing mods we can include. So if you see anything in here that you've seen elsewhere, speak up!

UPDATED AGAIN

Asymmetric warfare

Thanks to Damburger, ianinsane, and NikNaks for their ideas which have resulted in this feature.

Asymmetric (or terrorist) units will be invisible and operate like spies, using espionage points.

Units:

Damburger said:

How about having a 'Terrorist leader' unit, which can spawn other terrorist units in the same way a worker produces terrain improvements (not sure if this is viable to code at this point). The other units then can be used offensively, for example:

Insurgent: Basic infantry unit
IED: Invisible, immobile unit that automatically does a one shot attack at the first enemy unit to enter its square
Technical: A weak armoured unit.
Suicide bomber: One shot bombard unit
Katyusha: Multiple shot bombarding unit
Modern Pirate: Naval unit that can blockade
Hijacked plane: One shot bombard, more powerful than a suicide bomber and airborne. Must be used on turn created.
Terrorist aircraft: Works like a bomber, but weaker

These are all examples drawn from recent real-world events

Click to expand...

We have to figure out our limitations before we know whether we will be able to have the terrorist leader recruit units. I suspect we will be able to do this, but again it is something the AI would have to be able to do. If not, I suppose we will just have to have each of the units above buildable in cities that contain a terrorist headquarters building or something.


Missions:

ianinsane said:

So my suggestions for terrorist operations are:
- Bomb attack (cheapest, causes unhappiness)
- Bomb building (destroys building, causes unhappiness)
- Concerted bomb attack (causes much unhappiness, chance of switching certain civic to less liberal)
- Assassinate great specialist (kills a great specialist, causes unhappiness)
- Bomb wonder (extremely expensive, imagine like 9/11, destroys wonder, causes extreme unhappiness, high chance of civic switch)

Unhappiness should not only be caused in the attacked city but in every city of that civ. But less than in the attacked city.

Click to expand...

As NikNaks suggested to me, we could have certain attacks take food away from the city. This would reflect the loss of lives, without removing hundreds of thousands or millions of people.

I think we all agree that we can represent non-state sponsored terrorists by simply having the barbarian civ create them. It could also be done through events as ianinsane suggested, but for the sake of simplicity we may as well keep all asymmetric warfare under the same tent.

Idea: Insurgents

Update: As explained by Joecoolyo below, most of this can be done with the Revolutions mod we are going to include. So we will leave this one alone until we see how the rev mod works in our game.

This thread is looking grim so far, someone please post a happy idea or two.

I've done my best to compile the various ideas for this into one plan.

Local War
For example, this might be war where US and China fight over Taiwan, NATO and Soviets for Cold War Berlin, or from history, alternative version of beginning of WW2.

• Can be declared over only 1 city, which must have less than 60% culture of enemy civ or must be in riot
• AI (original civs and all their allies/vassals) will attack/defend only this city (though may attack enemy units nearby)
• After 5 turns will either come to Cease Fire or Total War (given choice to both sides; if pre-war relations were at least 'cautious', high chance that both AIs will choose peace, not depending who owns targeted city)
• No nuclear weapons
• Fairly insignificant negative diplomacy changes for aggressor

Total War
More or less standart war from CIV4, but:

• Around 2-5 civs involved
• Cease Fire can't be declared for the first 10 turns, because if civs wanted peace, they had a chance during Local War
• AI tends not to use ICBM unless they lose more than 50% of original army or 50% of original territory
• If any ICBM is used, switched to Nuclear War (player is warned)
• Serious negative diplomacy changes for aggressor

World War
Larger scale version of total war

• 7+ Civs involved
• All UN Resolutions become null and void, UN Wonder ceases to work
• Activates all offensive\defensive treaties
• War cannot end till one side or the other has vassalized the enemy or destroyed their Civ
• If any ICBM is used, switched to Nuclear War (player is warned)
• Very serious negative diplomacy changes for aggressor

Nuclear War
(Using both the M.A.D. Nukes mod and the Nuclear Arsenal mod)

• Every civ involved in Total War launch their ICBM on enemy cities, targeting cities with ICBMs at first
• Some devastating and/or end-of-the-world (but not game) events occur

Proxy War
The armament supply among civs should become more important. I'm not sure how to make it work but it should be custom that Civs supply wartime enemies of their enemy with units. That way they can weaken their enemy without having to go to war themselves.
I can think of several ways to do this:

• If a Civ gives a unit to another Civ the usual way (moving into the others therritory and donate it) it should have effects on diplomatic relations...like +1 for every few modern units
• If a Civ asks you to join its war against another there should be a third option to answer like "No, but I will [secretly] supply you with weapons." Then a new diplomacy screen pops on and you can choose which of your units to transfer to the other Civ. But you can't just put a warrior on the table to buy your way out of it. The other civ has to accept it like any other trade. If you put too little on the table the "you refused to help us during war time" malus will appear. If your offer is accepted then there is no effect on relations. To gain a positive effect you additionally have to donate units the way I described before.

EDIT: Cross-post with DVS there. I guess this doesn't count as happy.

DVS said:

Idea #2: Insurgents

from another thread:

Modifying barbarians to represent modern day insurgents:




This is where we will use our Janja weed, Taleban, etc unique units. It would be great to have different regions of the world have different style barbarian units (insurgent units)

Click to expand...

This is were we can use the Revolution mod I recommend before. Within the mod if cities you've captured don't like you (they usually don't), a couple things can happen, if your still at war with the civ you captured the cities from, "reinforcement" units will appear outside the city, if you've destroyed the civ, either it will pop out against with units outside the cities or barbarian units will appear outside of those cities. We can use this to simulate Taliban like groups without having to modify or code a bunch. Plus, when the civ spawns back, it receives a great general on the field and usually gets guerrilla and woodsman promotions. This makes them at least a formidable foe and makes it harder to put down.

I would just like to point out that, from a realism point of view, 'suitcase nukes' do not exist. The closest thing is backpack nukes (only developed by the US) which are very large, heavy, and have small yields:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special_Atomic_Demolition_Munition

Other than that, good ideas. If Civ isn't going to shy away from representing Stalin and Mao, then it shouldn't shy away from representing Bin Laden should it?

Damburger said:

I would just like to point out that, from a realism point of view, 'suitcase nukes' do not exist. The closest thing is backpack nukes (only developed by the US) which are very large, heavy, and have small yields:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special_Atomic_Demolition_Munition

Click to expand...

Ok, thanks for that info. For some reason I always thought it was true that Russians had suitcase nukes in the US during the cold war.

So maybe we should scrap the nuclear terrorist all together, and just keep the regular terrorists that damage buildings, remove population, and possibly add unhappiness.

Damburger said:

Other than that, good ideas. If Civ isn't going to shy away from representing Stalin and Mao, then it shouldn't shy away from representing Bin Laden should it?

Click to expand...

That's what I figure. I have done horrible, unspeakable things to the people of eastern Europe while playing as Hitler in civ mods, so representing present day bad guys can't be a big problem.

there is no such thing as a nuclear terroist at the moment so doubtful it should be included aye.

Joecoolyo said:

This is were we can use the Revolution mod I recommend before. Within the mod if cities you've captured don't like you (they usually don't), a couple things can happen, if your still at war with the civ you captured the cities from, "reinforcement" units will appear outside the city, if you've destroyed the civ, either it will pop out against with units outside the cities or barbarian units will appear outside of those cities. We can use this to simulate Taliban like groups without having to modify or code a bunch. Plus, when the civ spawns back, it receives a great general on the field and usually gets guerrilla and woodsman promotions. This makes them at least a formidable foe and makes it harder to put down.

Click to expand...

Indeed, I wasn't sure if that mod brought in reinforcement type units. So, it looks like we won't need to do this ourselves, that's great. We'll see how things work with the revolutions mod and we can modify it if we have to.

Thanks a lot

For example, with the revolutions mod, it would be nice if we could modify it so that the units are different depending on what country/region the rebellion is taking place in.

DVS said:

For example, with the revolutions mod, it would be nice if we could modify it so that the units are different depending on what country/region the rebellion is taking place in.

Click to expand...

Well actually (having experienced rebellions in my games) the units that appear as "rebels" are only the type of units in those cities. For example, if all you have is archers in those specific cities, then the only unit that will appear are archers.

Joecoolyo said:

Well actually (having experienced rebellions in my games) the units that appear as "rebels" are only the type of units in those cities. For example, if all you have is archers in those specific cities, then the only unit that will appear are archers.

Click to expand...

Ok sweet, glad we have your input. So that is what we will have to modify.

Awesome. I knew there was something like that in it.

NikNaks said:

Awesome. I knew there was something like that in it.

Click to expand...

you did tell me so.

I'm responding to something Mattygerst said in another thread because I didn't want to post my big off topic response in that thread:

Mattygerst said:

Question/comment:

I've played many mods where there are "unit specific" to a certain country...yet you can still build them as other countries. For example: The Panzer tank in WWII was, I believe, a German-specific tank...so it should only be able to be built by the Germans (yes, I know that unit is in the past...just using it as an example). Just making sure that we are going to keep country-specific units only build-able in those countries.

Click to expand...

I get what you're saying, and we are. I think this has been discussed somewhere else, I'll dig around.

As far as I know we haven't decided how we're going to handle who gets to produce what. We are certainly going to have country specific units, but how to handle them is wide open. Someone suggested having licenses that can be sold (but not brokered). So you'd have to buy the rights before you can build Russian (American, Chinese, whatever) military units. At the start of the game, countries should only be able to produce what they can actually produce themselves right now in reality.

We should be able to do this with a minor modification to techs, so the AI should be able to do it. One problem I foresee however, is the AI wasting money on redundant licenses like they do in maxriga. So we should try to limit civs to one license per unit type.

Another Feature I would love to have that has been discussed here.

ARMS TRADE

The major producers could sell units to smaller, rich nations. If we have to, we can make it as simple as allowing units parked in the city with the building that allows this to be sold as you'd sell a tech.

I think it's such an important part of how the world works, it certainly merits it's own section on the diplomacy screen.

You'd be required to have a military, air force, or naval academy somewhere to be able to purchase related units (to train the crew).

The only problem with this, is having the AI actually use it properly. It seems like something we should obviously have, because it's what happens in the world, but if the AI won't buy or sell on it's own, or if they use it in stupid ways, we'll have to make due without it.

Also talked about elsewhere I believe...


Deficit Spending

This and other modifications that we want to make to the GDP function should be figured out once and for all. Personally I think we should try to make the trade system better, and increase the use of lending.

Right now, when you're trading you are limited to spending your surplus gold. But if a country has a large treasury, shouldn't they be allowed to increase their deficit by spending money beyond their surplus to buy resources? It is stupid that AI civs that are spending to the max on research/espionage won't go farther into the red to buy oil they need when they are under invasion.

Hopefully we will be able to make this work, and we can get a little fancy with it. We can prevent small AI civs from being totally irresponsible by cutting them off when they start screwing themselves over. Even give civs a rating, lowering it if their economy begins to struggle, and that's when restrictions kick in. Human players could see the ratings on the "International Monetary Fund (IMF)" screen. IMF rating is also hurt by certain economic civics. Being in a trade org should probably give you a bump.

We could also try to make the AI handle this better by only letting it increase the deficit to buy things it really needs. Extra oil only when they are at war, happiness resources only when their happiness rating is low, etc etc. Again varying degrees of restrictions based on their IMF rating.

I also think it would be nice if we could increase the frequency of money lending. Poor nations should more often borrow money from rich ones and use it to hurry production. Interest rates/availability dependent on the attitudes of rich nations towards you of course. The US and EU should be making big loans to some of our micro states and weaker unions. Ideally.

The amount of loans you have and have had would also tie in to the IMF screen.

As always all of these changes are dependent on how the AI will react to them. If the limitations are there to prevent the AI from extreme stupid spending then we will have to forget about this.

If anyone has seen a mod that modifies the GDP in any way, please share.


Also, on a side note, I think we should remove all references to "gold" and replace them with "dollars"; including the icon. (as long as the USD remains the world's reserve currency... who knows, we may have to change it back!). Please don't anybody mention exchange rates etc until well after V1.0 comes out!

Improved Statistics


I'm sure we'd all like something changed in regards to the statistics.. so let's decide what.

Hopefully someone familiar with the programming end of things can enlighten me as to what is possible.

Personally, if it won't slow down our game any, I would like to be able to view the full lists of each of the demographics (rather than just your info, best/worst/avg, and your ranking).

Also I don't think it should take any espionage points to see everyone's details. It should require modern computers at best. Needing espionage to view GDP and military strength makes sense in 1492, but in the modern world all of that info is available on one website.

I think there may be an existing improved statistics mod, I will look around.