Caveman 2 Cosmos (ideas/discussions thread)

[Thunderbrd]

Just a small 5% boost to attack or defense or both.

Do we have any standards for the promotions? I know blue background is for normal and purple are Doctrines or Traditions but I am not sure what Red, Orange and Green are. Though I thought Green were for Heroes.

Yes, any combat modifying tag is definitely going to be passed along through the Commander to those within his command range.

And yes, this may not be the full list but it's what I can remember off the top of my head.
Blue (Gold foreground) - Skill promos
Violet (Gold foreground) - Special (yes, doctrines and traditions - we COULD vary the foregrounds to denote the difference...)
Red (Gold foreground) - Commander promotions (which is what you're looking for I think)
Green (Gold foreground) - Heroes
Black (White foreground) - Invisibility manipulating
Black (Gold foreground) - Hidden Nationality manipulating
Black (Red foreground) - currently only Wanted promos, but the meaning could be expanded to 'Negative Special Status'
White (Black foreground) - Visibility manipulating

Intended -
Deep Purple (Green Foreground) - Afflictions; possibly differing foregrounds for different types of afflictions with Green being disease, Red being crime, maybe Black being poison, Orange being criticals. I also mean to make a hexagon shaped frame and alpha channel for this
Orange - not sure if that's claimed for any specific purpose yet - possibly going to be used for equipment eventually. Will probably use a different foreground than gold for another sub-categorized meaning. Equipment may also use a circular background to help further differentiate them.

 

[Dancing Hoskuld]

When looking at UNITCOMBAT_COMMANDER I find it has promotions available to it that require promotions that are not available to it. In particular Operations I is available to UNITCOMBAT_COMMANDER bit it requires Tactics 2 and neither Tactics 1 or Tactics 2 are available to UNITCOMBAT_COMMANDER. I wanted to use the tactics promotions since these are minor adjuncts.

Aside: Pie_at has a whole bunch of battle formation promotions in his mod that may be useful. I think they would be Status promotions in C2C. Especially if we ever get a Tactical Battle Map. Human on human only naturally no way anyone would want to write the AI code for that!

Yes, any combat modifying tag is definitely going to be passed along through the Commander to those within his command range.

And yes, this may not be the full list but it's what I can remember off the top of my head.
Blue (Gold foreground) - Skill promos
Violet (Gold foreground) - Special (yes, doctrines and traditions - we COULD vary the foregrounds to denote the difference...)
Red (Gold foreground) - Commander promotions (which is what you're looking for I think)
Green (Gold foreground) - Heroes
Black (White foreground) - Invisibility manipulating
Black (Gold foreground) - Hidden Nationality manipulating
Black (Red foreground) - currently only Wanted promos, but the meaning could be expanded to 'Negative Special Status'
White (Black foreground) - Visibility manipulating

Intended -
Deep Purple (Green Foreground) - Afflictions; possibly differing foregrounds for different types of afflictions with Green being disease, Red being crime, maybe Black being poison, Orange being criticals. I also mean to make a hexagon shaped frame and alpha channel for this
Orange - not sure if that's claimed for any specific purpose yet - possibly going to be used for equipment eventually. Will probably use a different foreground than gold for another sub-categorized meaning. Equipment may also use a circular background to help further differentiate them.

Do we have any base buttons for all these?

We have combat, worker and hunter doctrines and traditions. It may be nice to vary the laurel wreath as well. Crossed pick and spade for worker?

 

[Thunderbrd]

When looking at UNITCOMBAT_COMMANDER I find it has promotions available to it that require promotions that are not available to it. In particular Operations I is available to UNITCOMBAT_COMMANDER bit it requires Tactics 2 and neither Tactics 1 or Tactics 2 are available to UNITCOMBAT_COMMANDER. I wanted to use the tactics promotions since these are minor adjuncts.

All that is necessary to identify an entire promotionline and all the promotions in it as being available to a unitcombat is to simply assign the prereq to the promotionline:

        <PromotionLineInfo>
            <Type>PROMOTIONLINE_TACTICS</Type>
            <Description>TXT_KEY_PROMOTIONLINE_TACTICS</Description>
            <Button>Art/Interface/Buttons/promotions/tactics1.dds</Button>
            <UnitCombatPrereqTypes>
                <UnitCombatPrereqType>UNITCOMBAT_COMMANDER</UnitCombatPrereqType>
            </UnitCombatPrereqTypes>
        </PromotionLineInfo>

This means ALL tactics promos are available to Commanders. You can thus use any Tactics promotion as a prereq for other commander promos if you wish.

Aside: Pie_at has a whole bunch of battle formation promotions in his mod that may be useful. I think they would be Status promotions in C2C. Especially if we ever get a Tactical Battle Map. Human on human only naturally no way anyone would want to write the AI code for that!

While I'd love a tactical battle map, I think to be realistic it's far too outside the core goals of C2C to be able to imagine it ever becoming a reality for this mod. I do think AI could be made for it that would work great - not like there aren't games that do that. But we'll be pressing memory hard just to implement multi-maps for space travel, let alone for this sort of effort. Among many other things vying for limited memory space. If the game weren't limited by it's EXE I'd be all for adding it to the plan though. If I ever do start a game from scratch, that WILL be an aspect of it.

The formation promos sound awesome as statuses. I might be able to further play off of them in some options in development as well so I'd be happy to see them added to the game.

We have combat, worker and hunter doctrines and traditions. It may be nice to vary the laurel wreath as well. Crossed pick and spade for worker?

I'd be agreeable to that.

 

[Yudishtira]

Willem is in Modern with Destroyers (he should probably have more, but that's another matter), but my Frigates and Sloops of War can still bombard his (nearby) cities and return to port safely.

I can only suggest a 'building' that creates a ZOC-like effect adjacent to a city, the effect being to halt enemy naval movement (actually wasn't that the effect of ZOCs in the old boardgames?).

 

[strategyonly]

I believe we need to get rid of the SEM maps, i just started a new game on the no civ map and only 10 turns in i have alot of turn problems??

attached are 3, one ordinary turn then nutty ones? if anyone can verify turns times are crazy sometimes??

 

[Thunderbrd]

Do we have any base buttons for all these?

There was a standard background set I downloaded a long time ago somewhere floating around...

Willem is in Modern with Destroyers (he should probably have more, but that's another matter), but my Frigates and Sloops of War can still bombard his (nearby) cities and return to port safely.

I can only suggest a 'building' that creates a ZOC-like effect adjacent to a city, the effect being to halt enemy naval movement (actually wasn't that the effect of ZOCs in the old boardgames?).

ZOCs do have very large game slowdown issues at the moment. You can only achieve this if your cities are very close to your targets of course. Not that the AI would do this but if you have someone doing it to you you can always build a wall of ships to try to keep them out.

 

[Dancing Hoskuld]

Willem is in Modern with Destroyers (he should probably have more, but that's another matter), but my Frigates and Sloops of War can still bombard his (nearby) cities and return to port safely.

I can only suggest a 'building' that creates a ZOC-like effect adjacent to a city, the effect being to halt enemy naval movement (actually wasn't that the effect of ZOCs in the old boardgames?).

ZOCs do have very large game slowdown issues at the moment. You can only achieve this if your cities are very close to your targets of course. Not that the AI would do this but if you have someone doing it to you you can always build a wall of ships to try to keep them out.

We should have a series of coastal defense buildings that do a lot of damage to and enemy ships getting to close to the city. There could be an Archimedean wonder for the classic era but mostly it would take the form of cannon and up to artillery. After all ships are "sitting ducks" in this situation. Can it use the old "opportunity fire" or what ever it is called now.

 

[Thunderbrd]

We should have a series of coastal defense buildings that do a lot of damage to and enemy ships getting to close to the city. There could be an Archimedean wonder for the classic era but mostly it would take the form of cannon and up to artillery. After all ships are "sitting ducks" in this situation. Can it use the old "opportunity fire" or what ever it is called now.

Not all games use opportunity fire since it's a bug option. Do we want them to be buildings? The current depth of that system only enables immediate adjacent plots to be hit and only during the turn changeover (as does the opportunity fire mechanism) which is a little different than what I think you'd be wanting (and I would want as well to match what you're suggesting.) I'm thinking we'd want improvements for this, and for a deepening of the 'adjacent' damage system so that the range can be stronger than 1 space out.

There's also an alternative approach to ZOC that I've considered here that could apply to ALL applications of ZOC. I spoke with Afforess a while back about ZOC and he explained that it's supposed to represent the inability to move through a space without coming under direct enemy fire. Problem is, what if you are willing to take that enemy fire and move through anyhow? I feel that it would be better represented by actual automatic distance bombard attacks for moving through covered plots that a movement suppression. This would mean that you could approach your target or skirt around a stronghold, but it would hurt to do it potentially.

NONE of this can be applied overnight but does represent some neat eventual things we can setup.

 

[Dancing Hoskuld]

Not all games use opportunity fire since it's a bug option. Do we want them to be buildings? The current depth of that system only enables immediate adjacent plots to be hit and only during the turn changeover (as does the opportunity fire mechanism) which is a little different than what I think you'd be wanting (and I would want as well to match what you're suggesting.) I'm thinking we'd want improvements for this, and for a deepening of the 'adjacent' damage system so that the range can be stronger than 1 space out.

There's also an alternative approach to ZOC that I've considered here that could apply to ALL applications of ZOC. I spoke with Afforess a while back about ZOC and he explained that it's supposed to represent the inability to move through a space without coming under direct enemy fire. Problem is, what if you are willing to take that enemy fire and move through anyhow? I feel that it would be better represented by actual automatic distance bombard attacks for moving through covered plots that a movement suppression. This would mean that you could approach your target or skirt around a stronghold, but it would hurt to do it potentially.

NONE of this can be applied overnight but does represent some neat eventual things we can setup.

Sounds about right for gunpowder on. For before gunpowder the current ZOC is more correct since it also represents the fact that if you bypass defenders they get the chance to attack you from the rear with surprise etc.

 

[Thunderbrd]

Sounds about right for gunpowder on. For before gunpowder the current ZOC is more correct since it also represents the fact that if you bypass defenders they get the chance to attack you from the rear with surprise etc.

That still doesn't mean that the attack would be automatically lethal.

 

[tmv]

There could be an Archimedean wonder for the classic era

Like https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Claw_of_Archimedes ?

 

[JosEPh_II]

Raxxo wrote in the SVN Changelog thread:

@Thunderbrd , why you never changed ingame name of era, since like 10% - 20% of all stuff has different defined name and displayed name anyway?

Because changing a define name used to cause Broken save games. And it is Not something we want to do time and again. Really makes plyers when we even Have to do it.

 

[Yudishtira]

I have a bunch (4) of minor (free) promotions I would like to add. They are part of my dance stuff providing small buffs to attack and defense.

However I think they may be better as part of the Commander (as they are tactics rather than equipment or proficency) rather than the units. Does giving these promotions to the Commander give them to all the troops under their command?

My understanding is that the Commander's promo bonuses apply to as many nearby units as are within his Control Points and Control Range. I'm not sure whether these are reset once per turn (probably so), or whether you get another set for in-between turns.

Also can I just point out that Commanders are an option. I personally found that option OP last time I used it (you never lose a unit once your Commander has 5 or so promos - and he ends up with literally dozens), so I'm going to play without it for the foreseeable future. Just saying, in case you would prefer your new promos to be more 'core'.

 

[raxo2222]

Raxxo wrote in the SVN Changelog thread:

Because changing a define name used to cause Broken save games. And it is Not something we want to do time and again. Really makes plyers when we even Have to do it.

In this case it still would break game, but I didn't change define name (still its ERA_MODERN), I changed game text entry.

Here is text entry with untouched translations.

<TEXT>
        <Tag>TXT_KEY_ERA_MODERN</Tag>
        <English>Atomic</English>
        <French>
            <Text>Ere moderne</Text>
            <Gender>Female</Gender>
            <Plural>0</Plural>
        </French>
        <German>
            <Text>Moderne:Moderne:Moderne:Moderne</Text>
            <Gender>female:female:female:female</Gender>
            <Plural>0:0:0:0</Plural>
        </German>
        <Italian>
            <Text>Moderna</Text>
            <Gender>Female</Gender>
            <Plural>0</Plural>
        </Italian>
        <Spanish>
            <Text>Edad contemporánea</Text>
            <Gender>Female</Gender>
            <Plural>0</Plural>
        </Spanish>
        <Polish>Współczesna</Polish>
    </TEXT>

In huge amount of cases (~11% of techs for example) define name and game text entry doesn't agree:

<TEXT>
        <Tag>TXT_KEY_DEFINETYPE_DEFINENAME</Tag>
        <English>Whatever you want to put here</English> 
    </TEXT>

 

[Thunderbrd]

Raxxo wrote in the SVN Changelog thread:

Because changing a define name used to cause Broken save games. And it is Not something we want to do time and again. Really makes plyers when we even Have to do it.

Changing the in-game cosmetic name of an object doesn't break anything, just creates a schism between the <Type> name and the <Description> name. Rax is saying we have a lot of those already so why haven't we changed the cosmetic name of the Modern era already.

To answer him here, because there have been huge mod team debates over this naming in the past and I was then willing to bend to the opinions of the others in the discussion. I brought it up again because Whisperr's rant on this end was rather convincing to me that it should be addressed still. I was hoping some of the key points of why we left it that way would be brought up again so I could be reminded of those at least.

My understanding is that the Commander's promo bonuses apply to as many nearby units as are within his Control Points and Control Range. I'm not sure whether these are reset once per turn (probably so), or whether you get another set for in-between turns.

I believe they reset at the beginning of your turn, so your points must be budgeted throughout the whole round and thus what command points you spent during your turn's attacks count against any defenses you must endure subsequently thereafter during other player turns. I COULD be wrong since I'm not looking at the code directly right now, but it's my educated guess considering standard practices and how it would go in a simultaneous turn environment vs a 'take turns' environment.

I personally found that option OP last time I used it (you never lose a unit once your Commander has 5 or so promos - and he ends up with literally dozens)

Oh there are ways to exhaust the enemy commander... it's rather fun to wear them out actually. I don't find them all that great tbh, and still feel it's better to more commonly use them as Military Instructors. One of the greatest moments in the history of play experiences for me was one of the last rounds of the Massive Multiplayer game we had running, where I brought so many withdrawal strong mounted units in to wear out the POWERFUL commander of the opponent force to then rip the rest of his hundreds of units apart in his stack thereafter. My commander there was a babe in comparison to his at the time and could hardly be considered present by comparison.

Someday the AI will be able to think like this. Someday.

 

[Dancing Hoskuld]

My understanding is that the Commander's promo bonuses apply to as many nearby units as are within his Control Points and Control Range. I'm not sure whether these are reset once per turn (probably so), or whether you get another set for in-between turns.

Also can I just point out that Commanders are an option. I personally found that option OP last time I used it (you never lose a unit once your Commander has 5 or so promos - and he ends up with literally dozens), so I'm going to play without it for the foreseeable future. Just saying, in case you would prefer your new promos to be more 'core'.

I never use Commanders either.

I did toy with them being a Tradition/Doctrine but they are relevant over a long period so they would normally be a Doctrine which is a Great Wonder but most should be available to all so they should be a Tradition but then they only be relevant over a short time span or in limited circumstance. I may be able to split it up a bit. Make the Haka a great wonder only available to eastern Oceanic Cultures.

I have another one in the works that will be both a National and Great Wonder for North-eastern North American Cultures. There is a GW that provides a bunch of trade goods with other stuff, getting one of the trade goods lets you build the National wonder which gives you some of the benefits of the GW. Not sure if that will work as a game mechanism.

 

[JosEPh_II]

I brought it up again because Whisperr's rant on this end was rather convincing to me that it should be addressed still. I was hoping some of the key points of why we left it that way would be brought up again so I could be reminded of those at least.

Don't know that it really matters anymore to try and remember them either.

Just did not want the save games to get broke by being uninformed of the potential to break. Or by a Team member making an assumption.

 

[Jozef]

Hello and thank you very much for this mode.
It is almost a year since the 38 version. Is there an approximate date for 39 version?

 

[raxo2222]

Don't know that it really matters anymore to try and remember them either.

Just did not want the save games to get broke by being uninformed of the potential to break. Or by a Team member making an assumption.

I think everyone, who is modding know, that they can change display name (entry in gametext) without changing define name.

 

[strategyonly]

Is there anyways "we" could move conscription to an earlier era and tech requirement?? it comes pretty late as in Med Era, i believe it should come earlier .. . that way i can get extra soldiers from building houses/pastures etc from workers??