Ahriman
Tyrant
I don't agree with this, have you played FF lately? Тhe AI tends to use the same strategy as I do, count on your units to eather die, or get so good from the XP that the wrong promotions don't mater any more. But maybe I have just been playing to much banor lately..
The equipment promotions are the only FF promotions I am aware of that are mutually exclusive. Which was the point at hand; shock and cover aren't mutually exclusive, plasma gun and missile launcher are.
Not for several weeks. But what difficulty do you play at? Thats a pretty bad strategy, particularly at Immortal or Deity difficulty level (where the AI gets lots of free unit promotions).
FFH and FF is all about unit preservation. The 20% strength bonuses per level (as opposed to 10% in vanilla civ) mean that veteran units are *massively* more powerful that their un-veteran counterparts.
Remember that a 20% strength differential shifts a 50/50 fight to a 70/30 fight.
So accepting unit losses of units with poor promotions is a bad idea.
In most wars in FFH/FF (at least at real difficulty levels), the AI has built up a massive army and then invades with this.
Units constructed after the start of the war are trivial.
As one of the quotes in civ says "He who goes to war and expects to win has already lost, the victorious general first wins and then goes to war" or something like that.
In other words, build your army *before* the invasion. The AI does.
So, if the AI builds a big army and upgrades them all with plasma guns (because it doesn't have the missile launcher tech yet) and then gets into a war and you have tanks, it will get totally hosed; its existing army will be pretty helpless against your tanks, and it will be unable to rapidly adjust to get an AT force.
Your mod is much more specialized than even shock/cover. In FF, shock/cover gives 40% bonus, regular combat gives 20% bonus.
In your design, plasma vs missile launcher will have an even larger impact than this.
You can't be *almost as effective* against tanks using a plasma gun or heavy bolter as you can using a missile launcher.
The AI can still put up a decent fight against your army of axemen without shock promotions if it just uses normal combat promotions.
But the AI isn't going to be able to put up a decent fight against your army of tanks if it gets plasma gun promotion rather than missile launcher promotion.
Wait, are you sugjesting that I add the ability for a single unit to have multiple weapons at once? This can get messed up...
Not what I'm saying.
By concern was this;
a) AI discovers tech for tac squad, and starts pumping out tacs.
b) 30 turns later, AI discovers tech for plasma gun, and instantly upgrades its entire army to plasma guns
c) 30 turns later, AI discovers tech for missile launcher, but can't upgrade to missile launchers because its entire army has plasma guns
d) AI gets into a war with human player using tanks; AI is a pushover because it has no AT.
This is a problem. But less of a problem if instead we have:
a) AI discovers tech for tac squad, and starts pumping out tacs.
b) 30 turns later, AI discovers tech for plasma gun. However, it can only upgrade to the plasma gun when i) it makes new tac squads or ii) its existing tac squads gain a level
c) 30 turns later, AI discovers tech for missile launcher, any of its existing tac squads now upgrade to a missile launcher when they gain a level because the AI sees you have some vehicle units
d) AI gets into a war with human player using tanks; AI is a not a pushover because it has at least a little AT.
However, the intelligent AI selection of promotions will only occur when those weapons gain strength bonuses vs particular unit classes.
Ie: The AI will choose the shock promotion when you have melee class units.
BUT: the AI won't choose a promotion that gives fire damage when your units have a promotion that makes them vulnerable to fire
and so similarly: the AI won't choose a missile launcher promotion because your units have a promotion that adds resistance to various other damage types.
This is a problem with your idea of using the elemental damage system combined with damage resistances through particular armor promotions; the AI can't see (or plan for) the armor promotions when choosing its weapon types.
And it will only choose its weapon types if they have bonuses against unit classes that you have access too.
So, even if you have a system where vehicles have an "armor plating" promotion at start that gives them high resistance to lasgun, bolter and plasma damage, if you want the AI to get missile launchers to counter your vehicles, it isn't enough for the missile launcher to add +3 AP damage.
The missile launcher must actually have a strength bonus against unit class: vehicle (like shock/cover/formation etc).
You take out the AC, you rename a lot of things, you add the Combat related culture changes (a favorite of mine), you do a lot of other things that I would need to do
We're probably putting the AC back in ("winds of chaos"). Influence-driven-combat is another civ modmod somewhere, there are probably instructions in that for how to get it implemented.
Name changes are just text (and you'll have to rename them all anyway for 40k).
Mostly true, though I've also read some of the books and browsed the codexes. But the point still holds;I can't blame you for this part, you mostly know only from the PC games
And even if "improvements" aren't pillagable, you still have to either:
a) let players build them OR
b) have them pre-built on map script creation. (in which case you may as well use my version).
I agree about making use of the population; in my conception "making use of the population" is represented by working that tile.
So, you can only exploit the population or a resource if you have enough military force to keep them secure and/or repressed. This is what the population size of a base represents; how many tiles in the area near a base you can keep secure enough to extract resources from. And this tile might be a town (commerce production) or a factory (hammer production) or whatever.
These don't necessarily have to be your main troops; you can conscript locals to form militia, hence why some tiles provide manpower. With enough manpower from local forces, your base size grows, and you are able to work another tile, or keep it secure.
But if marines or orks or whatever invade a planet, its not like they spend a ton of time building farms and mines. They're building military bases, not founding cities. And they're not putting lots of resources into developing cities by building civil infrastructure in them (factories etc).
Which is what you have if you have normal city development and workers building terrain improvements.
My version makes it much more of a military mod, and less of a development mod, which seems to fit the idea of an invasion better.
This also helps make the mod more challenging by removing the production advantages that the human player normally gets from superior improvement placement/construction.
I'd work on a timescale of 1 turn = 1 week.