A plea to Firaxis...

[dog]

OK, I'm going to get down on my knees and beg. Please, please, please...if you only do one thing in the first C3C patch...please add an "improvement required" flag for units in the editor. Please!

Why is this so important? Because of the huge amount of custom units that are available. Just look at the SOE mod. How could a modder hope to add all of those beautiful units into an epic game and have it somewhat historically accurate. If Germany has 12 different WWII tanks to choose from, it's only going to build the one with the best stats. What if I add an elite unit like the British SAS? All the English cities will pump out these powerful units like crazy, which would be both unbalancing and inaccurate. Wouldn't it be great to be able to make a mod where you could have a nice assortment of flavor units running round instead of just the one best defense, offense, artillery unit of each tech advance?

The answer is to have a flag that can require a unit to need an improvement to be built. This can be used in a couple of ways. If desired, a small town would be able to build a basic foot unit. As it got larger and built the required improvement, it could build stronger units such as mechanized or armored. Perhaps a shipyard improvement would be needed to build the large ships such as carriers and battleships. Another way this flag could be used, and the manner of use that I'm most interested in, would be to require small wonders and great wonders to build elite units. I want to see German SS units, US Special Forces, Soviet Spetsnaz, Persian Immortals etc but I'd like to see them as stronger units in smaller numbers as would be more historically accurate. In the current build system, if the spetsnaz becomes available, that's the only offensive unit that the Russians will build! But imagine, if one could require a small wonder for that spetsnaz unit to be built...only one city in the Russian empire would be churning out spetsnaz units. So instead of hordes of spetsnaz we'd see a few such units interspersed amongst the tanks and APCs. That would be cool and much more realistic. You could have several cheap small wonders available and these would be used as the anchor requirements for the elite flavor units of all the civs.

Just think, an elite Palace Guard unit that would require the Palace to build. British SAS units that would only be buildable by the city with the Commando School small wonder. You could actually see all of ripptide's amazing WWII units being produced and used by the AI! Steph just made a new variation of Balou's spetsnaz unit. Now we have an arctic spetsnaz and a forest spetsnaz. The arctic spetsnaz could require a small wonder that in turn requires a tundra based resource within it's city radius to be built. So arctic cities could build arctic units and desert cities could build camel based units.

I know about the new Great Wonder feature that allows a Wonder to create units. But I play almost exclusively with flavor units and cannot accept the idea of Chinese Knights Templar or Iroquois Immortals or Japanese Legions or African Minutemen or Aztec SS Stormtroopers.

So please consider this humble request for one tiny little new editor flag that will open up new worlds of modding possibilities. Thank you.

Please...?

 

[Mongoloid Cow]

I like this idea. Lets just hope Firaxis does too.

 

[Dargoth]

Try this

Tie the unit to a resource (the resource isnt actually a resource that provides shields/trade or food its just a label) then use the new rules that came with C3C where can make it so a city can only build a unit if it has a certain resource within its border ie The Age of Discovery Scenario.


So lets say your creating a WW2 scenario using a world map and your going to make all 3 of the Axis powers one civ.

Create 3 resources

German race

Italian race

Japanese race

place these resources on the tiles your going to place your cities so Berlin would sit on a German race tile, Tokyo would sit on a Japanese race tile.

Create units

Tiger tank

Yamanto class Battleship

etc

The Yamato class battleship would have a resource requirement of: Japanese race and Tiger Tank would German race. This would stop a Yamato class Battleship from being built in Germany or a Tiger tank being built in Tokyo

Hope that helps

 

[Evie]

That's not really a solution to his problem though.

What he wants is to have only certain towns within a country able to produce certain units to represent the infrastructure required to build such units - ie, a large shipyard would be needed in order to build battleships or carriers, for example, and it would in turn be costly to maintain.

 

[statusperfect]

Originally posted by Dargoth
Try this

Tie the unit to a resource (the resource isnt actually a resource that provides shields/trade or food its just a label) then use the new rules that came with C3C where can make it so a city can only build a unit if it has a certain resource within its border ie The Age of Discovery Scenario.


So lets say your creating a WW2 scenario using a world map and your going to make all 3 of the Axis powers one civ.

Create 3 resources

German race

Italian race

Japanese race

place these resources on the tiles your going to place your cities so Berlin would sit on a German race tile, Tokyo would sit on a Japanese race tile.

Create units

Tiger tank

Yamanto class Battleship

etc

The Yamato class battleship would have a resource requirement of: Japanese race and Tiger Tank would German race. This would stop a Yamato class Battleship from being built in Germany or a Tiger tank being built in Tokyo

Hope that helps

Can already be done by simply assigning units to civs in the editor

 

[Pfeffersack]

I like the idea of making improvment or wonders a prequesite for units, too.

Another "workaround" is using the new ability of wonders and improvments: "produces units".Sure, the problem is they haven't any production cost, but if you set it to "one unit every 10 or 15 turns", the effect is there are only few of those units.

 

[Dargoth]

Originally posted by statusperfect


Can already be done by simply assigning units to civs in the editor

that doesnt work

If you tie a unit to a Civilization then every city in that civilization can build that unit. ie The Axis in europe could build a Yamato class battleships and an Axis city in Japan could build a tiger tank

 

[Lab Monkey]

I AGREE!

It seems such a simple thing to do, too. It's hard enough making Civ Specific improvements.

 

[Mercade]

Dog, that sounds like an excellent idea to me!
I wholeheartedly endorse it.

 

[warpstorm]

Originally posted by Lab Monkey
It seems such a simple thing to do, too.

Lets's see. The editor changes would be fairly simple. Then there would be the changes to the biq and sav files to store this. The pediaicons.txt format may need changed also (I hope not as a modder). This means that the save and load codes need changed (in both the editor and the game). Plus they need to support the old file formats and convert each of them to the new format in both the editor and the game. Okay, that's the simple changes.

Next, you need to mod the build code in the game to work this way. Not trivial, but probably not too hard either.

Now onto the hard one. Change the Build AI code so that the AI players can effectively make use of this new feature and not just waste its resources.

While the parts except for the AI should be easy (this may be easy also, I really don't know about AI programming, yet), they will take time (and money) to do.

 

[Chieftess]

You can have improvements produce a unit every X turns.

 

[dog]

Originally posted by warpstorm
Now onto the hard one. Change the Build AI code so that the AI players can effectively make use of this new feature and not just waste its resources.

Maybe I don't understand what you're saying here. My idea is to use the required improvement just to get the unit into the build list. Then the AI chooses the best for it's needs. For example, let's say the basic German tank is the Tiger Tank. It will appear in all city build lists. One city has a small wonder that is the prerequisite for the King Tiger Tank which now appears in it's build list. The King Tiger tank will have improved stats over the Tiger (or the Tiger could "upgrade to" the King Tiger) and so the AI chooses, for that one city, the King Tiger when it decides to build an offensive unit. These unique to one city units would have to have better stats than the basic unit so that the AI will build them.

Dargoth, the thing about placing resources is that that method will only work for scenarios. I was hoping for this ability in the random map epic games.

 

[dog]

Originally posted by Chieftess
You can have improvements produce a unit every X turns.

The only problem with that method is that units are not civ specific (flavor units). If you have a wonder that produces Mounted Samurai, for example, then the Dutch could build that wonder and I just can't deal with Dutch samurai running around.

 

[warpstorm]

Originally posted by dog


Maybe I don't understand what you're saying here. My idea is to use the required improvement just to get the unit into the build list. Then the AI chooses the best for it's needs.

What I was getting at is that code would need to be added/modded to 'teach' the AI the value of these new 'required to get you good units' buildings. Without this they would never see that they should be building these buildings at all. Without the buildings, they won't build the units and will be crippled. AFAIK, the current build logic doesn't concider that it may have to build a building to build the unit it wants.

That's all I was getting at.

 

[Civrules]

Originally posted by warpstorm

Now onto the hard one. Change the Build AI code so that the AI players can effectively make use of this new feature and not just waste its resources.

While the parts except for the AI should be easy (this may be easy also, I really don't know about AI programming, yet), they will take time (and money) to do.

It is probably easy to program the AI to do this but you know how a simple code change can cause some pretty unexpected bugs to arise in the game.

 

[Pfeffersack]

@ dog

Hmm...wouldn't it be possible to connect the Small wonder(which produces the untis) with a tech, which is untradable and only avaible for one civ?

 

[dog]

Originally posted by warpstorm


What I was getting at is that code would need to be added/modded to 'teach' the AI the value of these new 'required to get you good units' buildings. Without this they would never see that they should be building these buildings at all. Without the buildings, they won't build the units and will be crippled. AFAIK, the current build logic doesn't concider that it may have to build a building to build the unit it wants.

That's all I was getting at.

Ohhh...I see. I misunderstood you. I had planned on giving the small wonders an ancillary benefit, something the AI already is programmed for, like increased happiness or something to get the AI to build it.

Pfeffersack, that's a good idea and might be a workaround but the only problem for me would be that I'd have to add a small wonder for each such unit. If the improvement required flag were added then I'd only have to add a few small wonders as all civs could build them and each have different elite units requiring the same small wonder. You could even use the same small wonder for different units of the same civ over different eras. The one thing that would stink is if an AI civ had two or more elite units in the same time period (like Germany during WWII) and all the small wonders were built in the same city.

 

[robcheng]

Originally posted by dog


The only problem with that method is that units are not civ specific (flavor units). If you have a wonder that produces Mounted Samurai, for example, then the Dutch could build that wonder and I just can't deal with Dutch samurai running around.

So just make the wonder require some new strategic resource that only exists in the city/cities where you want the units to be produced...

 

[CIVPhilzilla]

Nice idea.

 

[Ivan the Kulak]

This is a good idea, and has been asked for by others before, myself included. The problem with tieing it to resources only in city radius is that often a city with the requisite resource may be small and prone to corruption, so you won't see much production there. By tieing a resource to a building improvement, and then having that improvement necessary to build good units (i.e., a tank factory for building tanks, or a Naval Yard for constructing AEGIS Cruisers), you could achieve the desired effect. These special buildings could be required on top of the usual buildings, Factory, Power Plant, etc. The goal would be to make it possible to have these things only in a few, important core cities that the player must defend heavily - losing your 400-shield Tank factory to heavy bombardment would definitely put a crimp in your plans for world domination. Adding a production boost to these facilities would enable you to crank out units quicker, compensating for the inability to produce these units elsewhere. It would also be possible to limit the number of these facilities the player can build, based on # of cities controlled.

The AI would have to be coded to put a priority on building these also, maybe it should receive a shield bonus so it can stay competitive.

As far as building unique, high powered flavor units goes, maybe you should only allow these to be built in the capital city. That would effectively limit their numbers.