Conquest XP Creation Wishlist

Someone had to do it...

Firaxis probably won't listen, but at least it'll give us all a chance to vent some steam and then we'll have a legitimate moan when it turns out that it won't be in the XP...

I'll kick things off:

1. The ability to add eras
2. The ability to add eras
3. The ability to add eras

*ahem"

4. Forced diplomacy, with the option of at start of scenario only, or all way through game

5. AI triggers

6. AI properly using units with less than all the worker actions selected.

7. AI knowing when to Upgrade and Rejoin units

8. The diplomacy text should be restructured so that it isn't reliant on knowing how many civs there are. That way you wouldn't need to mess about with that horrible string text when you add a new civ.

9. The units tab of the editor should have sections for inputting pedia text and pathnames for pedia icons, but being able to do so in plain english w/o worrying about stuff like PRTO, # or ^. In fact, that should probably go for all the tabs. If that takes up too much space, then a button with a pop-up asking you to type the stuff in.

10. The AI should stop patrolling. The number of times I've seen AI units moving back and forwards to and from the same tiles...it's ridiculous and causes a huge drain on system resources.

11. Be able to spilt your territory into regions. A good way would be to simply select one city, the city(/ies) closest to it and say they make up a new region. A box pops up asking for the region name. Simple

12 The ability to set whether or not a transport unit can itself be loaded onto other transports (like helicopters onto carriers). I imagine you'd need 2 load flags, then.

13. The ability to add new culture groups.

14. The ability to choose which tile improvements and city improvements are era-specific.

15. Be able to let each civ have it's own set of advisors.

16. A box, similar to the Ignore Move Cost box, which would give a combat bonus to the unit when fighting to or from that terrain.

17. Ground units should be able to use air missions w/o doing wierd things like flak units flying through the air on intercept missions. Although, I think this probably involves a change to the format of the INI file, with dedicated lines for intercept, recon, etc.

18. The game engine should automatically draw the lines between techs. Yep, you heard me correctly; that way we don't have to mess about with the pcx files and can just add techs with the editor.

19. Being able to move units, techs, buildings, etc. up and down the list would be handy since that affects it's position on the in-game build list.

20. Be able to set whether or not a specific fast unit will retreat on a percentage chance, or will always retreat.

21. A land Transport AI strategy flag would be nice (and obviously the AI be able to use it ).

22. Civ-specific tech-trees.

23. Era-specific barbarians.

24. Give modding control over movement bonus on railroads.

Anyone else got any others?

Make the age of sail a helluva lot longer.

Originally posted by Pasi Nurminen
Make the age of sail a helluva lot longer.

Click to expand...

Also, and purely for asthetic reasons... adding to #11... how about having the region name appear on the map as a watermark much like a real world map. It might look cool

I know this probably falls on deaf ears and I'm the exact opposite of a programming nerd so i dont know how hard it is to implement it but....

Tanks DO NOT get killed by spearmen.

How?

Add armor values to make unit generations (not necessarily eras) highly distinct i.e. earlier generations have only a slim...like .01 percent chance of kicking some higher generation ass.

+ events, triggers, and all that good stuff

1- Make the movement cost change unit to unit. 0 meaning : the unit cannot enter this kind of terrain (-> add a list of terrain in the unit tab, where you can select the cost). To allow us to mod faster, the terrain will have a default cost, and new unit will use it, except if specifically changed. Of course, some units must have the possibility to go in land and water (to make real helicopters).

2- Make the defense bonus for each terrain change with unit. Same method as 1 (So we can have camel who fight better in desert, Phalanx which are good in plains but bad in mountains)

3- Introduce the notion of "unit class" (for instance Infantry, Cavalry, Armor, Air, Naval, Sub). Each units belongs to one of this class, and has bonuses against other class. exemple : Pikes have a bonus against the Cavalry class (but not the armor class!), Aegis Cruiser have a bonus against Air class, Destroyer against the Sub class, AT gun against Armor and MG against Infantry, etc.... The bonus could be attack and/or defense

4- Add inside the editor the possibility to copy a unit or a building or a government, keepin all its attributes, so we can easily make improved version without to make everything by hand.

5- For terrain improvement, add a flag to state if they consume the worker or not.

6- Make the sentry function work if the fortify is disabled.

7- In the editor, sort the dropdown list , so we can easily find the prerequesite! (In my mod with 300 techs, it starts to be quite boring to do this).

8- Make the maintenance cost specific to each units.

9- Introduce the notion of "Internal name" and "displayed name". This could be handy for flavour unit. For instance, we can have an US Infantry, FR Infantry, UK Infantry, GE Infantry for a WWII scenario, with different animations and stats, but they will all be displayed with one name : Infantry.

10- Make it possible to have civ specific animation and or icon for units, but sharing the same civilopedia entry and stats -> We had the unit once, but then we change the animation to make flavour units.

11- Add some efficiency rating for the government (science / happyness / Trade, etc) that could affect the speed at which buildings (that are commercial, religious) are created, or the production of science, gold and shields, etc.

12- Make it possible to have AND and OR prerequesite.

13- Add buildings and governments prerequesite for units. You need a shipyard to build ships!

14- Make building upgradable, for a cost that would be smaller to the regular cost. Still with my shipyard idea : Ancient shipyard can be used to create galleys. To make battleship you need a modern shipyard. In a new city, you can directly create the modern shipyard, or you can upgrade the ancient one for a lower cost. Also, ancient shipyard are removed from the build queue once modern shipyard are available.

15- Make the efficiency at military police (to reduce rebellion, or prevent disorder) unit specific, so Special Forces may have a bonus for instance.

16- Add a new flag "affect units only" for unit, so we can make for instance chemical weapons that damage units / population, but not the building.

17- Add a Naval Task Force that would work as armies, but for fleet.

18- Improved the efficiency of blocus to reduce the production or prevent the passage of ennemy troops and or goods.

19- Make it possible to have more than 2 different types of barbarian. I think we need at least one for each era (the best would be 3 per era : one slow moving but stronger, one fast moving but weaker, and one naval).

20- Introduce religions into the game. They would work a bit like governments (so the combination of religion / government gives unique bonuses). It would also be nice if a capture city retains for a while its former religion, and if unhappyness is linked to religion difference between population and owner of the city. To go with it, add a flag for units "can convert". A unit with this flag as a % of change to convert each turn one of the citizen into the owner religion.

21- Add a flag "can bombard land" and "can bombard sea". So submarine can try to use their torpedo against naval transports, but cannot use it against troops on the shore. Even better, make two row : bombard strength, ROF and range against land unit / against sea unit. This way, we could have aircraft specifically designed to attack ships, other for ground attack. While they are at it, they could even make the bombard change with the class (bombard against infantry, cavalry, armor, naval, sub).

22- Add a flag to make aircraft loadable on carrier without the need to use to many tricks

23- Add a flag to tell if a unit can capture a city or not

24- Add a flag for unit, so it could appear "automatically" it the city is capture (good old guerilla resistors of CivIII)

25- Increase the number of levels for city (more than 3 levels), so we could have more than 2 buildings which the flag

26- Put back the second level of irrigation (and perhaps introduce a second level of mine as well), to give workers something to do in the end of the game.

27- Add something to make change in the civilopedia easier. CEC for instance.

28- Add munits in the package, including PTW munits.

Zulu, what would be the ingame use of region?

1. Allow marines to attack other ships, and capture prizes - just like real maritime warfare! I really want to do that

2. Introduce earlier marines in the age of steel swords

Region idea would be good for interface, city handling and such.

In addition to zulu's 11, would be cool to have regions to revolt and separate sometimes, to form a new civ. In Civ1 there were these revolts, that was a cool feature. Chance to it would raise from nearly impossible in early game to low in 30+ city civ. Luxury output (not luxury items) would have a meaning then, as it would lower the chance somewhat.

"Revolts and new civ" is one of the idea I miss most ...
My request would be also more than 31 civs! Call me crazy, but I don't like to play normal civ with less than 31, even though the game becomes so slow at the end; ...and I already run out of slots with all these leaderheads available at CFC.

I wonder how it will be... there 16 basic civs, 8 in PtW, 8 in C3Q... that's 32 civs total. I'm afraid there will be no possibility to play PtW+C3Q and you will have to choose, or mod something in between yourself (yet still, you will have 31 not 32 original civs, with no slots for player-made ones).

Two others :
- Add a limit to the number of units of a given type you can have at the same time, to represent some unique elite force (for instance, only 1 immortal unit for Persia!)
- Add a flag "no building", so you cannot build a unit, but only have it at the beginning of a scenario.

They already said there is going to be fixed diplomacy zulu.

Well, When you have 20+ things you want to be included, you are going to be disapointed...

How about if we Put together a list of say five or six things which we think are esential to making good scenarios and all submit the same list of requests via E-mail. If they have 30+ people all asking for the ability to add eras, its more likely to happen.

Oddly I'm not too badly upset by the way the scenario editor is currently, Ive got one request which if its not taken up will cause me not to buy the add on, and thats making buildings a possible prerequisite for Specific Units.

For instance, you need a ship yard to build ships, and a Submarine pen to build subs, & a tank factory to build Tanks & a Aerodrome to build aircraft etc...

I don't know how the AI would cope with this in the standard game, as it doesn't like to build infrastucture (same goes for many players) But it is invaluable for a detailed modern scenario & removes much of the need for specific triggers.

For example, say you want Sevastapol build marine infantry.
Have a building; "Shipyard" Require access to water to be built.
Have marine infantry require "shipyard" to be built.

Or if you only want soviet tanks to be built in major cities. Have factories require a special "Major industry" Resource within the city radius. Place it next to your major cities. Then make factories a required building for tanks.

Also this alows special units such as Secret police (requires Espionage centre), Special forces (baracks or training centre) Cavalry (requires Stables, meaning that you dont need horses as a resource for ever, just a supply of horses that you can breed), Parratroopers (airport), Knights (castle or keep) etc...

Also by restricting unit production to the capital (by setting Palace as a requirement) you could limit the number of special elite troops such as pesian imortals or Waffen SS...

Of course I'd like to see starting diplomacy options for scenarios, & more diplomacy options such as "Stop your war with our friends..." & the option to swap or sell military units to your friends.

Be able to sonly "Only these civs can be this government" a flag like that would be cool.

Originally posted by sela1s1son
Be able to sonly "Only these civs can be this government" a flag like that would be cool.

Click to expand...

I think thats going to be there, they mentioned the Islamic Caliphate.

Zulu, the early versions of Civ III were set up so that the computer automatically generated the lines between technologies. But around version 1.17 or so they changed it so that you have to mess around with pcx files, much to my disappointment. I also hope they change this back because I have no artistic skill whatsoever.

Another thing I'd like to see is the ability to set unit maintenance for each type of unit, similar to how we can modify hit points. That way a Battleship could cost 3 or 4 gold to maintain while a Warrior would only cost 1 gold. This would be set up as a modifier to the base maintenance cost for the government you are currently using (which is usally 1 gold per unit). Cities would provide free support for a certain amount of gold instead of a certain number of units. If a government was flagged with "All Units Free", then all of that civ's units would still be free regardless of a unit's modified maintenance cost.

Also, as many others have mentioned, I would like the ability to set diplomacy in the editor, which it sounds like they will be doing.

I noticed that they will have events like Volcanos in the expansion, so this may mean that there will be the ability to edit random events or some kind of scripted events.

In addition government specific units would be nice, but IMO isn't vital.

Oh yeah, & "government switching not allowed" tag, perhaps Or just the ability to restrict governments to specific culture groups, shouldn't be so difficult.

So my list would be;

#1 Possibility to make Buildings a prerequisite for Units.

#2 Ability to control governments in scenarios.

#3 (as I know its gonna be in it anyway) Diplomatic controls for scenarios.

#4 The ability to add terrain types (Something else I'm prety sure is gonna be in the expansion).

All of the above, and my normal harp about having a split-level ground/air-space so that things like satellites, space stations etc can actually be used properly

Smoking Mirror,
the list can be quite long if they can be easily implemented. Custom maintenance, more unit prerequisites etc. are trivial things while adding terrain isn't (but I would also like it). Same for my "dream" request, I expect that more than 31 civs in game are hardly possible, but to make at least the initial list of civs to choose from longer than 31 should not be a problem.

I'm sure these were mentoned, but they are my essentails:

1) Defense bonus against mounted

2) Defense against Bombard

3) Government specific units (like Fanatics in Civ2)

4) Improvement specific units (like make "Forge" required to make Swordsmen)

5) The ability to upgrade improvements (like upgrade "Forge" into "Steel Mill")

6) The ability to obsolete improvements and select "when" (Like make city walls obsolete at Gunpowder. Also, the ability to set the city size walls stop working at)

Things I'd Like:

1) Events

2) Graphics program (Like they had in Civ2. Its great to encourage more people to start modding)

3) The ability to do everything in one program (so you won't have to mess with text or other files. This would be much more convenient)

OK i will try to round up something small and that I think (I am no programmer though) should be easy to implement.

That list is besides : diplomacy, events and remove FoW that I hope will already be included.

- buildings and government-specific units

- changeable upkeep (not only 0 or 1) for units (mercenaries, but not only)

- editable unit class and benefits/limits for (attack) or against (defend) these classes to be edited as percentage (just like buildings percentage against bombard).

- ability to create civ-specific, non-tradable techs

- make the flags for improvements, Small and Great Wonders available for all (actually not all of them are needed).

- obsolescence for luxuries

- make action flags more important than current classes (ex : build road is actually flagable for a unit and usable by the AI without it having all worker abilities (terraform flag)).

- upgrade and obsolescence of buildings

- limit the number of some units (fixed or percentage of the army, or % of the pop or % of cities (this exists already for armies)).
- capture princess on ships (pirate use)

- enable "some" (flag) ships to sail rivers, make rivers terrain like road terrain and make Railroad a factor (%) of road movemement.
Even better, ability to really edit roads, railroads (more than two levels, graphics, movement)

- get a commission when a trade route goes through your territory, commercial network (the programming knows that already for such a trade would stop in case of war). Trade route would then be either the shortest one or you could (even better but for latter I guess) choose it.

- a pillaging unit does not require upkeep for that turn (at least until the XVIIIth)

That is all D ) I could have added tons of things like terrain, era creation but I just sticked to the small stuff that I think the program could handle because it has the basic informations already.

And Firaxis, if you read this, I won't complain if you take these ideas ! I WANT you to implement them.