Brainstorming about specialists

[mtagge]

I just wanted to throw out two questions about specialists.

1. Is anyone interested in changing the art and names for some of the specialists? Maybe instead of an engineer it could be changed to craftsman and have an icon of a dwarven blacksmith (keep great engineer as the name for the great specialist as it is fitting). I'm not an art guy, but if someone provides art, I can do the XML changes and put something out.

2. What do people think about changes to the types of assignable specialists available. Like split the engineers into craftsman and blacksmith. Both would get +3 GPP for great engineer, but one does 2 Hammers the other does 1 Hammer and 2 XP (you would get the blacksmith from the forge and the weaponsmith, craftsman from all others). Also possibly different types of priests for the different religions. The other idea I had floating around was to have specialists that don't provide GPP, but maybe come as free specs from buildings.

Just looking form brainstorming from the crowd before I decide if I want to put any effort into additional mod-mods.

 

[micmc]

one thing I tried with vanilla was a non-worker mod using specialists...

added a farmer, upped the engineer & scientist a little, then gave them as freebies to buildings. so other than resources you didn't ahve to fool with workers at all. It worked pretty nicely, nice smooth ealry turns ( I hate automated workers) just I didn't balance things terribly well so I was ending up with 40 and 50 pop cities and my city screen started looking like something a dwarf ate the pooped out, otherwise it was fun for awhile.

if we really wanted to tear the system down, create a Mana catagory, only fueled by specialists, the amount of mana dictating how much you many spells you can cast, or level of mages, or whatever you want it to control

as a subset of that idea, is splitting researchers, into regular "tech" research, and magic research, who would do more and better promotions/spells for your mages/priests.

 

[xienwolf]

Actually your "too many Specialists" dilema wouldn't be an issue in FfH (or BtS?), it groups the Specialists together when you get too many to display neatly. Then you have 1 picture of the Specialist head for each type you posess, and have to do a Mouse-over to see what the numbers are.

 

[Zechnophobe]

FYI, Xienwolf, that was a change made in BTS (And a good one at that).

 

[civ_king]

i have 0.31 but uh i had Dis with 408 people and the engineers didnt collapse (at least 380+ engineers)

 

[xienwolf]

I am speaking about the free specialists (display in the bottom, can't control how many you have. Typically it is just Great People, but it can be others... like settled Golden Hammers).

For the standard specialists it won't collapse automatically I guess.

 

[mtagge]

one thing I tried with vanilla was a non-worker mod using specialists...

added a farmer, upped the engineer & scientist a little, then gave them as freebies to buildings. so other than resources you didn't ahve to fool with workers at all. It worked pretty nicely, nice smooth ealry turns ( I hate automated workers) just I didn't balance things terribly well so I was ending up with 40 and 50 pop cities and my city screen started looking like something a dwarf ate the pooped out, otherwise it was fun for awhile.

if we really wanted to tear the system down, create a Mana catagory, only fueled by specialists, the amount of mana dictating how much you many spells you can cast, or level of mages, or whatever you want it to control

as a subset of that idea, is splitting researchers, into regular "tech" research, and magic research, who would do more and better promotions/spells for your mages/priests.

This is along the lines of something I was thinking. Only I was considering having the lands within the fat cross also determine the numbers of specs allowed in the city. I.E. a farm in the fat cross lets you have one farmer two if it has a bonus resource, a pasture lets you have a rancher, a mine lets you have a miner. I realise that would require SDK fooling, I'll play around with something like that over the next couple of weeks.

micmc, do you have what you did availible to look at? Even if it is for vanilla and XML only just to take a look at what you changed the rates to even if unbalanced.

 

[micmc]

no I sure don't mtagge, I lost it all when I had to do a re install, and just delted everything and started over. Though it'd be possible to tie in "farmer's" with number of farms in a fat cross, I just handled it with buildings, "give free" & "Allow", the mistake I made with imbalance is I had a building which increased food production on a global setting (on purpose at first) so each time this building got built in a new city, it kept making the farmer pull in that much more, so at one point I had farmers (1 specialist) pulling in like 104 food, 57 hammers and 34 gold..which while kinda cool, wasn't that much fun after the first time.

the actual changes are pretty easy, just if you add more than one non-Great specialist, (the bottoms ones), if you add more than 1, to the ones you can cotnrol your numbers, you stop being able to control the ones at the top of the list, I know TheLopez made a mod for getting aroudn this, but it was for warlords and I don't think ever got bumped up to bts.

and when making the art, don't forget the alpha file around the actual art you want to show as the little head in the city screen...it will turn average artwork into something that actually looks half way professional.

 

[mtagge]

I have some pics for the new specialists in the attached jpg. I think it looks better than the default CIV IV ones for a fantasy setting.

I am trying to change the settled great specialists to change their effects. My plan is to have the Great Prophet provide health to the city, Great Blacksmith provide XP (hammers if Sidar), and Great Bards provide Happiness. Scientists and Merchants are already overpowered specs. The only problem is I am getting a compliation error for the new DLL to use three additional yield types. In case anyone can help the compiler error I get is:

Spoiler :

Linking dynamic library: Debug\CvGameCoreDLL_DEBUG.dll
LINK : fatal error LNK1104: cannot open file 'msvcprtd.lib'

 

[xienwolf]

Love the icons. Would you mind if I include them in my MODCOMP?


I swear I remember seeing a mod which added new Yield types to the Specialists, but I didn't save a link for it, so maybe I am imagining things Your error makes no sense to me though. Have you ever compiled the DLL successfully yet? Maybe a small error in your setup somewhere along the lines?

 

[mtagge]

Here are the DDS files. I have included a malcontent as well, but didn't get around to finding out where in the XML the pic is specified.

The mod that added the additional yield was TheLopez's Doctor/Great Doctor Modcomp here: http://forums.civfanatics.com/downloads.php?do=file&id=47

I based my attempt off of his Doctor mod which he lays out the changes to add Health as a yield in the appropiate SDK files (included in his zip). Unfortunately I haven't successfully compiled before, I have mostly stuck with Python modcomps until now.

I think I might instead change plans from using great specialists to at add health, happiness, and XP (to get around the Sidar issues) and turn it into buildings instead ala academy. I was looking forward to having them as yields so that plots could give happiness/health/unhappiness/unhealth when worked.

 

[xienwolf]

Well I will be incorporating that functionality eventually if I can figure it out myself. As for the DLL issue, I'd be willing to bet that you did the changes correctly but you have the program set up incorrectly. Are you using Codeblocks? If so, follow this Tuturial word for word. The pictures really make it easy. If you use C++ instead, try following this one, though I haven't used it so can't vouch for it.

And thanks for the DDS files Though I will probably aim to be a bit less elegant and simply name them the same as the currently used icons to get around having to find them in the code