Looking for your thoughts and ideas on my military/economy mod ideas

ZanderC · Oct 12, 2010

Horrors of War

I've decided to make a mod to the way military is handled in civ 5. I feel that a war is not much of a detriment to the winning side, or in a stalemate/draw to either side. You only really suffer if you are losing the war. A stalemate can even be a big bonus to both sides as the XP accumulates. There are several reasons why this occurs, this mod will try to address those as I identify them. The basic idea for this mod is to make war a difficult decision and something you want to push to finish quickly. The current system of healing and xp rewards extremely long drawn out wars, while the slow production punishes daring advances that may sacrifice units.

Progress

Got a name for the mod! "Horrors of War" I think it reflects my ideas to make war more of a negative influence on your civ.
Have disabled all healing
Have reduced cost of infantry/mounted units (mounted will cost a little more than the infantry)
Reduces population on unit creation
Reduced maintenance to be a flat 2g/unit (with the higher number of half strength wounded units I believe this will be necessary at least at first)

Technical challenges

Not sure I'll be able to create or hook into an 'action' (fortify, sleep, alert, etc.) to allow the combining of units. I figured this would be easy but it's not. Doesn't seem to be exposed. More research needed!
Don't see any way to make maintenance based on the HP of the unit. Might have to do it manually at the beginning of each turn?
AI is going to be an issue until those functions are available.
Need a way to limit production of units to cities with 2 or more population. I thought I could use the settler as an example but it is hard coded for some reason.

Plans for the mod

Make most units take 1 population away from the city in addition to a much smaller amount of production. This would effect non-equipment based units. So catapults and tanks would still take lots of production but no population.
Disable all 'free' healing for military units. I think this would be better for the AI since it handles healing very poorly at the moment, resulting in a huge advantage for the player.
Allow similar units to be combined to produce a single unit with the cumulative HP of both units. So to heal a unit you would have to bring in replacement troops. You would not be able to heal an equipment unit that way Have to figure out a way to handle promotions cleanly.
Disbanding a unit should return some food to the city it was created from. Perhaps an amount of food equal to the population point at the time of creation, reduced by a % of remaining HP.
Have a mechanic unit to repair equipment units.
Change the current unit upkeep to be based on the hitpoints of a unit.
Create more of a shortage of strategic resources, and force decisions in every age between military units and economic improvements.
Reduce the terrain bonuses and xp bonuses, with an eye to lowering the effect of exploiting the AI's weakness.
Lower the power of ranged units. Maybe incorporate some sort of return fire as well. With no healing ranged units could become overpowered.
Fix AI to deal with new system

Looking forward to your thoughts and ideas,

Thanks!

Seven05 · Oct 12, 2010

ZanderC said:
Disable all 'free' healing for military units. Healing would eventually be done at a city at a cost of food or population.

You'll have to wait for access to the DLL source for this, mainly because the AI right now will not cycle units back to cities (or even just to friendly territory). I tried setting the healing rate for neutral and hostile territory to zero and the AI handled it poorly. It also adds the 'un-fun' micromanagement layer of having to shift units around to heal them back up, if you don't like the current unit shuffle with 1UPT a change like this will probably make it much worse.

ZanderC said:
Disable exponential upkeep, favoring instead a fixed upkeep (more to flesh out here later)

I don't think the exponential upkeep is a problem in and of itself, I prefer it over having a few 'free' units and then others that have upkeep costs. As far as I can tell it doesn't scale with map size or game speed, or if it does it doesn't scale well, and that's the real problem.

ZanderC said:
Make most units take 1 population away from the city in addition to a much smaller amount of production. This would effect non-equipment based units. So catapults and tanks would still take lots of production but no population.

I'd be happy if all 'people' units required population and gold alone, but I don't think it fits with the core design of a Civ game. Maybe cheating and handling them the same way settlers are (stop growth while building and use food to bolster production) would do the trick for 'building' them and then just reduce population when purchasing them outright. That way long-term military build-up would still effect population but it would do it through hampered growth instead of immediate reduction.

ZanderC said:
Lower the number of strategic resources available.

I haven't noticed any problem with having too many resources available in most games. There have been some cases where I'll have far more iron or horses than I will ever need for units but it doesn't happen often and when it does I usually have a shortage of luxuries. I think that perhaps a better sollution would be to have more option for using those resources to give the player a choice to make... use the iron for a bigger army or a better city.

ZanderC said:
Reduce the terrain bonuses and xp bonuses.

I've reduced and removed a lot of the 'cheap' ways of gaining XP and I think that has helped a lot. When you can't simply park outside a hostile city and let it bombard you without any risk of it killing you and when your ranged units can't shoot up through promotions by standing back plinking away at those same cities you don't have so many units with massive xp. If you also equalize the xp gain between attacking and defending and increse base HP for units so they don't get killed instantly you'll find yourself facing off against some tough opponent, even in the hands of the AI. Lose the 'instant heal' promotion too, that seems to be what the AI choses more than anything else.

A lot of these are pretty easy to test out, I've been screwing around with different combat variables for a few days and you can get some pretty good effects with the right combination of them alone. The AI has two big problems right now, they have troble moving multiple units (traffic jam!) and they don't know when to stop and heal without getting massacred. I don't think fewer units is the solution to either of them and I don't think we'll be able to properly address the AI combat problems until we can dive into the DLL source.

Mr.Carbohydrate · Oct 12, 2010

A few points, probably all a bit mixed up. :/

ZanderC said:
So my solutions are as follows:
*Disable all 'free' healing for military units. Healing would eventually be done at a city at a cost of food or population.

ZanderC said:
*Disable exponential upkeep, favoring instead a fixed upkeep (more to flesh out here later)

I am questioning the usefulness of this when the first problem you outlined is that there are too many units. Doing something like that would favour large numbers of units. Maybe I am missing a trick here?

ZanderC said:
*Make most units take 1 population away from the city in addition to a much smaller amount of production. This would effect non-equipment based units. So catapults and tanks would still take lots of production but no population.

Essentially making food a resource for human based units? Would be interesting trying to balance growth speed and production in a military city to get maximum output, probably would get tedious though.

ZanderC said:
*Lower the number of strategic resources available.

The number of different strategic resources or the total number provided by each resource?

I am going to assume you mean the latter because it makes more sense. I would probably prefer finding more uses for them so they spread thin than just shrinking them, providing an actual choice on what your resource is needed for. Haven't played enough yet to know if the st. resources are over abundant, but in my experience they have been reasonable.

ZanderC said:
*Reduce the terrain bonuses and xp bonuses.

I probably wouldn't just flat nerf the terrain bonuses, I would probably just tweak them around a little as they seem pretty fair to me. Definite reduction of xp bonuses though.

ZanderC said:
*Lower the power of ranged units.

Or at least create good counters for them.

ZanderC said:
*Allow similar units to be combined to produce a single unit with the cumulative HP of both units.

A question with the idea behind this. If I combine a unit with 5hp and shock promotion and another with 5hp and drill promotion. Does the unit provided have neither, one, the other or both of the promotions?

ZanderC · Oct 12, 2010

Seven05 said:
You'll have to wait for access to the DLL source for this, mainly because the AI right now will not cycle units back to cities (or even just to friendly territory). I tried setting the healing rate for neutral and hostile territory to zero and the AI handled it poorly. It also adds the 'un-fun' micromanagement layer of having to shift units around to heal them back up, if you don't like the current unit shuffle with 1UPT a change like this will probably make it much worse.

Yes, I agree, a lot of my changes will require significant AI fixes which isn't really possible at this moment. But I will still start on them anyhow.

I don't think the exponential upkeep is a problem in and of itself, I prefer it over having a few 'free' units and then others that have upkeep costs. As far as I can tell it doesn't scale with map size or game speed, or if it does it doesn't scale well, and that's the real problem.

Well the issue I have with it is more the obtuseness of it. Every other unit counts and it also changes unpredictably. But maintenance will be more of a balancing thing once my changes are complete so I'm very open to ideas.

I'd be happy if all 'people' units required population and gold alone, but I don't think it fits with the core design of a Civ game. Maybe cheating and handling them the same way settlers are (stop growth while building and use food to bolster production) would do the trick for 'building' them and then just reduce population when purchasing them outright. That way long-term military build-up would still effect population but it would do it through hampered growth instead of immediate reduction.

That's basically what I'm after, and it doesn't really bother me too much if it doesn't feel as much like a civ game. Ideally units would require some production as well based on how much equipment is needed (an archer would need more than a spearman)

I haven't noticed any problem with having too many resources available in most games. There have been some cases where I'll have far more iron or horses than I will ever need for units but it doesn't happen often and when it does I usually have a shortage of luxuries. I think that perhaps a better sollution would be to have more option for using those resources to give the player a choice to make... use the iron for a bigger army or a better city.

I've played a few mods that reduced the number of irons and horses from each node (maxing out at 2 I think) and it played really well, made you think a lot more about them. I also like the idea of having more non-military uses for the early resources though.

I've reduced and removed a lot of the 'cheap' ways of gaining XP and I think that has helped a lot. When you can't simply park outside a hostile city and let it bombard you without any risk of it killing you and when your ranged units can't shoot up through promotions by standing back plinking away at those same cities you don't have so many units with massive xp. If you also equalize the xp gain between attacking and defending and increse base HP for units so they don't get killed instantly you'll find yourself facing off against some tough opponent, even in the hands of the AI. Lose the 'instant heal' promotion too, that seems to be what the AI choses more than anything else.

A lot of these are pretty easy to test out, I've been screwing around with different combat variables for a few days and you can get some pretty good effects with the right combination of them alone. The AI has two big problems right now, they have troble moving multiple units (traffic jam!) and they don't know when to stop and heal without getting massacred. I don't think fewer units is the solution to either of them and I don't think we'll be able to properly address the AI combat problems until we can dive into the DLL source.

agreed.

Mr.Carbohydrate said:
A few points, probably all a bit mixed up. :/

I am questioning the usefulness of this when the first problem you outlined is that there are too many units. Doing something like that would favour large numbers of units. Maybe I am missing a trick here?

Well the upkeep would take different forms. With the healing changes, you would also be harder pressed to heal units meaning more would be killed off.

Essentially making food a resource for human based units? Would be interesting trying to balance growth speed and production in a military city to get maximum output, probably would get tedious though.

I think that's only really a tedious consideration for the early game, when every turn counts x100.

The number of different strategic resources or the total number provided by each resource?

I am going to assume you mean the latter because it makes more sense. I would probably prefer finding more uses for them so they spread thin than just shrinking them, providing an actual choice on what your resource is needed for. Haven't played enough yet to know if the st. resources are over abundant, but in my experience they have been reasonable.

Well either way the idea is to impose more of a limit on resources than what I've seen so far. Of course everyone's experience is different so I'll have to see how it plays.

I probably wouldn't just flat nerf the terrain bonuses, I would probably just tweak them around a little as they seem pretty fair to me. Definite reduction of xp bonuses though.

Or at least create good counters for them.

I feel the swing between the bad terrain and the good terrain is so large it greatly amplifies the AI's failings. Now if the AI is fixed I don't think changes would be as needed.

A question with the idea behind this. If I combine a unit with 5hp and shock promotion and another with 5hp and drill promotion. Does the unit provided have neither, one, the other or both of the promotions?

Well ideally I guess it would have 50% of both. But in practice I guess it would likely choose one randomly, or let you choose which.

Thanks for your thoughts! I am going to keep changing the OP to reflect my latest thoughts. I'm going to start on the actual modding (what is possible to do at this point anyway) sometime this week.

ZanderC · Oct 14, 2010

Updated OP with progress/more stuff

Zen Blade · Nov 22, 2010

Zander,

How did you change the unit upkeep costs? Can you show the code/XML, please? Thanks!

I am looking to make a similar adjustment, and may consider your route of change.
thanks,
-Zen Blade

Looking for your thoughts and ideas on my military/economy mod ideas

ZanderC

Chieftain

Seven05

Warmonger

Mr.Carbohydrate

Chieftain

ZanderC

Chieftain

ZanderC

Chieftain

Zen Blade

Warlord

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