development feedback

[Refar]

A short question on 0.9... I see there is a dll in the release ? Which one is it ? Are there any changes, or is it to ensure compartibility ?

 

[davidlallen]

It is JRouteNative, so that foot units and animals do not get railroad movement speeds. It affects CIV4UnitInfosSchema.xml and CIV4UnitInfos.xml.

 

[Refar]

Ach cool, it was a needed change.

 

[Refar]

As we were talking XP and promotions in the other thread... I had a somewhat radical idea a while ago...

How about the Leader of the Civ gaining XP ?
Since the time scale in Fury Road is short enought to -more or less- be the life span of a single leader, it would be cool to develop the character a bit...

Of course at much slower rate than units - maybe a scaling comparable with Great People generation, so a leader would gain a few (like 3 to 5) levels over the course of the game.

As reward there could be a selection of "perks" - extra traits no leader has in the beginning, but leaders can take on new level...

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Technically i know leaders can be given more than 2 traits... so it should be possible to add new traits while the game is in progress. AI could use pre-defined "learning plans".
It is of course some conding involved here... but i think it's not a impossible task.

 

[davidlallen]

How about the Leader of the Civ gaining XP ?

That is a common idea in many other games, but you are right it is new to civ. The civ leader is always offscreen, so any ability given to the leader is global. I could envision a trait tree for this leader. It might be increased strength of existing traits, or additional traits.

I was also thinking about "onscreen" leaders. I might experiment with this idea in some other mod, not Fury Road. In vanilla civ, a Great General is "onscreen" and moves around, but his main effect on combat is to give a few units, a few levels of XP. For a particular combat, it doesn't matter whether the leader is there or not.

Suppose leaders had a trait/promotion tree with effects like "+3 happiness in my city", or "+20% combat strength to all units in my stack", or "+25% food production in my city". With a game scale that really takes place in one lifetime, you might have one leader, or maybe as you advance you attract a second or third leader. Each leader would have enough impact that the exact location of the leader is important.

In a multi-generation game, you could also have a family tree of leaders. A leader may grow old and lose promotions. New, young leaders may spring up. It would be possible to have dynasties of leaders, where the child of a leader is not available to lead until age, say 16, but then has some traits related to the parent. This has also been done in other games, like the Total War series, but would be new to civ.

 

[Refar]

A on-screen leader might be a problem - there are multiple games trying this (not least Civ3 with the Regicide game mode) - and all fail miserably because the AI seem completely unable to understand - let alone defend against - the sudden death from loosing the leader.

This of course could be eased up a bit, if loosing the leader would not mean loosing the game.

Setting up a "family" sounds cool.

 

[davidlallen]

Good point about the AI. If you think about a leader bonus like +3 Happiness in a city, a human player would move the leader around from one city to another to make sure the city with the worst happiness problem had the leader. I am sure there is no related AI routine which would help with that.

I wasn't thinking that the game would end due to losing the leader. I agree that would be a severe game balance problem. But even if losing the leader doesn't *lose* the game, the AI would have to balance the benefit of using a combat leader in a particular combat, vs the risk of permanently losing it.

 

[Refar]

This might be somewaht simpler, with the "Family" approach - like in Total War games - the AI does keep loosing the Leaders/Heirs in dumb actions, but since the families are usually somawhat big-ish, it doe snot have too big impact...
At the same time of course the leaders become "less special" for the human as well...