"And/Either/Or" instead of Just "And"

[Virote_Considon]

Something I've been thinking about. For things such as units and techs where a prerequisite may require more than 1 of something (e.g. resources for units, other techs for techs). The way Civ3 handles this is makes it so that every preq. requires you to have all of everything. Civ4 handles it a little better - you can choose things it has to have and then either/or's. I think one better could be achieved by splitting the "ands" with the "either/or's", e.g.

Civ3: Warship requires timber and iron and saltpeter and tar.*
Civ4: Warship requires saltpeter and tar. Also requires either iron or timber.
Proposal: Warship requires either timber and tar, or saltpeter and iron.

If you wanted to make sure a resource was needed under multiple or all circumstances, it could just be specified in each "either" group, such as:
Warship requires either timber and iron and saltpeter or iron and coal or timber and tar

Does anyone else agree? This particular one with Civ3 doesn't come up much, but irks me to hell and back.

*Fully aware that a unit cannot have 4 resource requirements in Civ3. Just an example.

 

[Takhisis]

Yes! Even more obvious with buildings. Assuming you want to build a barn, you can just do it with a lot of timber, or stone, or dig a hole and shore it up with mud bricks, or, in the 20th century, iron and concrete? Same for a lot of other buildings.

Also, assuming the idea of 'upgrading' buildings (or units, since we-re at it? +2 to Def. Strength once you research iron plating? +1 to attack when bronze is replaced by Iron?):
If you build the aforementioned granary in the Neolithic by digging a hole in the ground and putting bricks in, you can later expand its capacity by building walls, etc. with wood, then again you can modernise it and build a huge silo complex since we're at it.

 

[WildWeazel]

That seems unnecessarily complicated. I can see the use of the single OR operator for resource and tech requirements but arbitrarily complex boolean expressions don't seem to add much value. Why not just make 2 units available with the same tech?

*Warship requires timber and tar, upgrades to Iron Warship
*Iron Warship requires iron and saltpeter

Iron Warship would be tougher anyway, so now you can give it more HP or higher defense.
(of course, we need a better upgrade/replace mechanism for buildings, for this and other reasons)

 

[Takhisis]

Weazel: I'm cobbling together some stuff on cities which should include buildings. Don't worry. I'll make it a bit clearer there.