My Idea For A New Feature

Ok, let's say you have a unit that has no experience points and a city with a barracks. I think it should be possible to "retrain" that unit in that city so that it ends up with 3 experience points. It seems logical to me that the unit would use up all of it's movement points by doing this and could only do the training if it has all of it's movement points (just like healing). I think it should always take 1 turn to retrain a unit.

Proditor said:

Ok, let's say you have a unit that has no experience points and a city with a barracks. I think it should be possible to "retrain" that unit in that city so that it ends up with 3 experience points. It seems logical to me that the unit would use up all of it's movement points by doing this and could only do the training if it has all of it's movement points (just like healing). I think it should always take 1 turn to retrain a unit.

Click to expand...

Its a good idea, but you would only really need to build one barrack, and my thinking is that would defeat the purpose of the barrack being a building instead of a Wonder.

I just realized that I put this in the civ5 section. I meant to put it in the civ4 section. I'm not sure if it applies to civ5.

Moderator Action: Moved to civ4 gen discussions.
Maybe this should have gone to C&C.

I'm always interested in ideas that might open up the higher levels of the promotion tree a little more often, instead of extremely rarely or never. However I don't think this one would work as it would take away the crucial early decision about whether to build the barracks before the first few units or after them, if they could just come back for basic training later anyway.

But I've always had a soft spot for the idea of another "plain" XP building in addition to the barracks and stable. Something maybe around gunpowder like a "shooting school" which gave another 4 XP, would just prise open the promo tree a touch more and make things more interesting IMO.

I realize this would affect game balance by relatively weakening the other sources of XP and promotions (civics, agg/pro, UUs, GGs, wonders, etc.) but not in an unsurmountable way. I won't hijack this thread any further by speculating along those lines though.

Kid R said:

I'm always interested in ideas that might open up the higher levels of the promotion tree a little more often, instead of extremely rarely or never. However I don't think this one would work as it would take away the crucial early decision about whether to build the barracks before the first few units or after them, if they could just come back for basic training later anyway.

But I've always had a soft spot for the idea of another "plain" XP building in addition to the barracks and stable. Something maybe around gunpowder like a "shooting school" which gave another 4 XP, would just prise open the promo tree a touch more and make things more interesting IMO.

I realize this would affect game balance by relatively weakening the other sources of XP and promotions (civics, agg/pro, UUs, GGs, wonders, etc.) but not in an unsurmountable way. I won't hijack this thread any further by speculating along those lines though.

Click to expand...

I'm not sure how it would affect the game if you could send units to a city to somehow gain experience. On the one hand, if only one unit at a time could train in a city with the appropriate buildings, then your army can only "level up" so fast.

On the other hand, the idea of specializing military unit production with supplemental buildings is an interesting one. What if instead of raw XP, the additional building meant that new units would start off with one or more specific promotions? They wouldn't even need to be existing promotions, they could be unique bonuses supplied by that "school". Maybe you could even set something up so when you pick the unit to build, you choose between a generic unit, or one that has received the additional training, and have the training incur an added production cost? After all, a specialist soldier takes longer to train than a basic grunt. Or maybe you could build the generic unit first, and when he's completed you can deploy him as-is, or send him for the advanced training, but is has to be the unit's very first action. The big question would be whether it's economical for a player to build the extra buildings and spend the extra production times, or whether they'd just build a more powerful generic unit instead. The additional skills and the training costs would have to be balanced well enough that they'd be a viable option.

Kid R said:

I'm always interested in ideas that might open up the higher levels of the promotion tree a little more often, instead of extremely rarely or never. However I don't think this one would work as it would take away the crucial early decision about whether to build the barracks before the first few units or after them, if they could just come back for basic training later anyway.

Click to expand...

I know it's 2 months later, but this might interest you then (for Civ4).