Can the Founding Fathers tech tree be replaced with the Civ4 tech tree?
M:C already has a tech tree added without replacing the FF system. They run in parallel.
I intrroduced
CivEffects in an experimental branch and it's almost done. The idea is to merge the DLL code for the following:
- Civics
- Inventions
- TradePerks
- Censures
- Traits
- Effects
This mean if one of those can do something, all of them can. Even through it's only intended to affect 1-4 features with each single CivEffect, there are around a hundred settings to pick from, making nearly endless possibilities for combos. On top of the obvious lock/unlock units/professions etc, it also has production modifiers, free promotions and... well nearly everything and the system is designed to add more options as needed. Once the code is complete, all this can be controlled with xml only.
More details here:
http://forums.civfanatics.com/showthread.php?t=543343
Basically, would the resource system from page 60 in the Imperialism I manual and page 79 from the Imperialism II manual be doable in Civ4Col? If so, and it is just xml, editing, point me in the correct direction and answer questions on an as needed basis, and I will do it...
Units/Professions tells input and output yields and Buildings tells how many. Quite a while ago somebody can by with a bunch of ideas and one of them was to allow something other than 1:1 conversion. This mean it would allow you to use 3 iron ore to make one iron bar, which can then be used as input yield for other professions or as construction requirements. My plan is to look into this once CivEffects works as intended.
Especially if you use the same number of resources as M:C (Yields) I cannot off the top of my head count how many resources there are in Imp. but I don't think it is more than M:C
The number doesn't matter as we can add and remove as needed. I don't think there are game engine limitations, which would prevent a hundred yields. It might be crammed in the city screen and too complex for the player, but not the game. Don't worry about that. If anything, then I might have optimized somewhere to reduce memory usage or get more into a network package. If that is the case, the limit would be 127 yieldtypes, which should be more than enough.
In the M:C code citizens can also 'consume' goods, so you can have the 3 level of citizen expert from Imp. Consuming their resources.
(At the moment hough I don't know if there is any consequence to not fulfilling the need, I think you just get gold from them... Night would know more.)
The trick with yields though would be replacing them 'cosmetically' rather than changing their code names as this requires modifying the .dll. Which is hard work starting out.
Units consume food. 2/turn by default, but M:C can change that and slaves only requires 1. Civics (CivEffect) can further change this and one of them provides +1 food consumption as a tradeoff for increased productivity or whatever it was. I capped this in CivEffects at 1, meaning 1 - 1 = 1 because I don't like the concept of units not eating food. Also it completely avoids the issue of eating -1 food.
Units can consume other yields, but currently that system is used as a "trade screen" to convert yields into money. If you fail to provide what the unit demands, then nothing happens at all. I don't think that is what you want.
Colonization 2071 has androids and we talked about allowing them to consume oil/electricity/whatever. It would be implemented as a list of yields in unit xml where you write how many the unit demands for each, which mean it would do the trick for Imperialism as well. I never actually started doing this, but with two mods requesting this feature, it might have to be moved up on the todo list.
Note: Colonization 2071 is another mod using the M:C dll code, or rather plan to do so in next release.
Civ4 mods are not usually compatible with Col without modifying, so i would wave yourself away from that thinking.
I both agree and disagree. We have a number of bts mods included in M:C. They might require a bit of recoding, but generally not more than when moving a feature between two colo mods. The only time I really had to work was when implementing bts plotgroups. It turned out to be using pathfinding in the exe and because vanilla colo doesn't use plotgroups, that exe feature appears to be missing. I had no choice but to design some code of my own to deal with that issue. Most mods do not change the interaction with the exe and shouldn't suffer from problems like that.
Other things from Imp. could also be done like 'Capital Production' where everything is done at home. You could make something like a capital building. that is required for all manufacturing buildings, then everyone would have to work at this home base and all resources would have to be taken to the capital
I'm not sure about this one. The easiest solution would be to make a "home city" in each city. Some shared empire or plotgroup production could be interesting though, but would require DLL modifications. I'm not sure how interested I am in that approach because odds are that either I make it or it will not be made. I don't even have a plan for what to investigate in order to make a design plan.
Also I'm not sure I like the gameplay part of it in a civ4 engine. However it is possible that we could do something at some point as it would be technically possible to do so, but for now I think we better ignore this aspect.
Expanidng the map is doable as well, I did it once so it can't be that hard! I think it was just changing a couple numbers in a map size file somewhere, but my memory is fuzzy at the moment..
It's in xml/gameinfo/worldinfo.
Code:
<iGridWidth>22</iGridWidth>
<iGridHeight>36</iGridHeight>
It should be fairly simple to change size to match your requirements and you can make more sizes if you like. There is one issue though. When zoomed out completely, only the bottom 128 rows of map will be drawn. The rest will be black. This affects only terrain and the game will work just fine as it is a display bug. I'm not sure if it is a bug or intentional to reduce the load on the GPU. Either way it is done in the game exe and out of reach of modders. We just have to live with it. This mean for best results, height shouldn't be set to more than 128. There is no known limitation on width through.
Do note that world size is a bit buggy in RaR as the map making script has the numbers hardcoded instead of requesting them from xml. I'm not sure if M:C has the same issue, but it's possible. Once somebody makes something in a mod and it appears to work, other mods tend to copy, even if it isn't the best solution. It should be a fixable issue though.
<- me
