A couple mechanic questions

[gazius]

Would it be possible to change how embarking works so that units are only able to do so from a city on the water? Or possibly just a building on the coast?

I tried to search for this but if it's covered I didn't find it.


Would it also be possible to duplicate and alter the culture system, with the AI understanding it? So you would create an alternative 'culture' point like political power, and then use those points on a re-purposed, duplicated policy screen for government programs? All of this would, ideally, function alongside the existing culture system without interfering in it's function.

 

[Spatzimaus]

Would it be possible to change how embarking works so that units are only able to do so from a city on the water? Or possibly just a building on the coast?

In theory you could use Lua to tie it to specific buildings within cities. So, for instance, you could code it such that a unit that starts a turn in a city with a Harbor would be able to embark while those that didn't can't. This actually isn't that hard to do.

Tying it anything beyond a start-of-turn event would take more work. Tying it to an Improvement would be even harder. There's also a special event for embarkation, but you're trying to prevent that event from triggering in the first place barring specific circumstances.

Would it also be possible to duplicate and alter the culture system, with the AI understanding it?

Generally, No.

There are two reasons for this answer. First, Culture is handled in a very hard-coded way, with very specific XML table entries and Lua functions, so mimicking it with some newly-added yield would be very difficult, and many things wouldn't match up correctly. There's been some work done on this, but a lot of the underlying system is inflexible enough to limit you.

Second, and more importantly, no, the AI would have absolutely no clue what to do with it. It would be utterly incapable of managing this sort of thing, and there's nothing you can do at present to make it understand how this system would work. Once we have DLL access (if that ever happens) then you'll probably be able to do something along these lines, but until then we're very limited.

Then again, the way the AI generally works, it doesn't actually "understand" anything. Everything's a function of Flavor values, where the mod creator tells the AI how much it SHOULD prioritize various things. So in theory it wouldn't be too hard to add a new Flavor type and weight it accordingly. But there's a big gap between tweaking which order the AI tries to pick new techs or policies in and anything requiring real decision-making.

(Go read the D.U.C.K.S. mod discussion thread for more detail on this.)