A More Dynamic Civ 3

[ZergMazter]

Hello everyone.

I dont know if any of you are like me, but to me it looks silly to see the AI making 1000 tanks and no infantry late in the game. The realistic scenario would be to have a strong infantry and tanks to support them, so i've figured out a way to limit the amount of tanks the AI and the human player can make.

I got 2 ways of doing this but both have their drawbacks:

1-
Increase the population cost of the tank to 50. The computer will never attempt to build it and the human player will be unable to build it. Make a resource (aluminum) based building (Tank factory) that produces a resource unit (Aluminum plates) every 5 turns, which could then be upgraded with gold into a tank.

This limits tank production because you need the resource to build the building in every city, that will then build the materials every 5 turns, and will need gold to be upgraded to the usable unit. You need an additional turn of wait time once you upgrade since the unit uses its turn upgrading.

The good:
It encourages humans to play smart, think in advance and not waste tanks since you will need to wait a full 5 turns if you exhausted your materials to upgrade more tanks. You will also see the AI combining their military more since they wont have a horde of 1000 tanks to ruin your day, and well the same can be said about humans. Also the materials can be capturable and tradeable if you assign them as artillery with no rate of fire and replace the worker with this unit in the general setting edit where it says 'captured units'. A crippled economy will affect your tank productivity as well since you will not have as much gold to upgrade the materials.

The bad:
A broken economy will result in hundreds of materials stocked up with no way of using them, at least for the AI since its not that bright. Humans can sell them via trade or disband. This tends to happens with massive empires. This issue will contribute to a slow game in between turns since the map will be full of 'crap'

I dont know of an efficient way to set a limit to the unit production of buildings :/. The only thing that i can really try is turning the MATERIAL unit into army status without the army capabilities. This will get rid of armies sadly, but you can maybe set a limit to the max amount of the mats you can have at a time since it requires you to have X amount of cities. It could be maybe like 1 MATERIAL unit per city.

Any suggestions? I really dont wanna kill armies but this will yield me in the end more fun than keeping armies anyway.

 

[Kyriakos]

You can already have a unit only appear through generation by a building (eg the original CivIII mounted hoplite/statue of Zeus cavalry)

 

[T-mun]

Agree with Kyriakos, autoprod is the way to go. Get yourself a "Tank Factory" (small wonder) and autoproduce tanks with it.

 

[Gray Wolf]

Also, I'm sure you know this already ... but you could auto-produce less frequently. Instead of auto-producing every 5 turns, raise it to every 10 turns or something like that ... to cut the total tanks in half.

 

[ZergMazter]

Yes Yes and Yes. The thing is that it would feel like an eternity late in the game when there is so much going on to just to get a tank if i raise the turns too high. Did u guys ever play Stronghold? Thats what im kinda trying to do, because units just being auto produced to me feels not so rewarding.

In real life you just dont build a tank factory and tanks roll out without any labor lol. Thats what i was trying to fix. I wanted to make it seem as if you were actually processing resources and turning them into product that could then be used to build units.

Also auto production will keep pumping out units wheather you are broke or not. The point of this was so that attackign someone's economy would halt or slow tank production, or using planes to destroy the factories would halt the production, because currently Civ 3 is too simple minded (build tanks, and kill ).

I dont know if you see what im trying to do. Right now the only way to stop production of tanks is to bomb the roads linked to resources. What if you had choices? What if you could use trade embargoes to hurt ur enemies gold so that they couldnt upgrade any more tanks? What if u had to bombard the factories themselves in every city to halt production completely, then bombard the roads linking resources to stop them from building the factories? Im also trying to create a way to help allies by giving them raw materials that they can upgrade to tanks, and indirectly enter conflicts.

Im trying to give a little more depth than just making a simple wonder auto-creating the same old stuff lol.
Edit: Not saying that civ 3 alone is simple, all civ tittles when it comes to military action are kinda simple. This is my fav of all civ tittles tho.

 

[Civinator]

I dont know if you see what im trying to do. Right now the only way to stop production of tanks is to bomb the roads linked to resources. What if you had choices? What if you could use trade embargoes to hurt ur enemies gold so that they couldnt upgrade any more tanks? What if u had to bombard the factories themselves in every city to halt production completely, then bombard the roads linking resources to stop them from building the factories?

Hi ZergMazter,

I highly appreciate thoughts how to improve C3C, as this is a very difficult field.
I don´t know if you have uploaded the WW2 Scenario SOE (at present an upload-link is not available due to the closure of the SOC-site).

Here I did all the options you mention in your post above and additionally introduced microzones for different tradenets in one country.

With the concept of advanced autoproduction an improvement can produce different units. You can bomb this unit away. If you want only one building in a civ that autoproduces certain units, set a small wonder as the perequisite for the normal building that autoproduces these units - that way even a single autoproducing building can be bombed away. So in your example you can bomb away the tank factory and bomb away the tradenet for the resource that is needed for the autoproduction. If you make the autoproduced base-unit cheaper than the unit it should be upgraded to, you also have the special "production-feeling" for each unit, as each autoproduced unit must be upgraded and a certain sum must be paid.

 

[ZergMazter]

Oh Awesome civinator! I wish there was a link here in Civfanatics tho :/ I need to reverse engineer your idea then so i can apply it to normal games as well. I notice how late in the game the AI and myself have thousands of gold that cant be used for anything and this will sure make use of that economy. The economy will be more dynamic. I love it.

I only wish somehow the game's code could be altered somehow to add the amazing ideas developed for later civ tittles. Civ 3 would be vastly superior to any of the rest as a result. None of the other civs have had a lasting effect for me. Civ 2 and 3 were the exeption. I wish they had kept the idea of civil war from civ 2 on civ 3 and also apply it to human players. I would love to deal with a situation like that if i was careless and see my empire divided, to then try and reunite it diplomatically or militaristicly.

 

[Civinator]

You don´t need to reverse-engineer this for normal games, as many of these concepts (and some other neat things) are in the epic mod CCM, that is still uploaded again in a new version:

http://forums.civfanatics.com/showthread.php?t=352057

The concept of microzones is not included in that mod as it is played on random maps and microzones are only working with fixed maps. I will temporary upload two screenshots from SOE showing microzones (they must be removed soon, as I´m at the end of the upload capacity at CFC).

Edited: Screenshots removed

 

[ZergMazter]

Awesome thanks!