Fallout radiation comments/suggestions

[Avahz Darkwood]

Fallout should not block units from a tile, but it should make them sick. Maybe a new irradiated promotion that would take effect immediately and can not be removed (unless a later tech/building allows). The unit will have a -50% to strength and a percent chance per turn of other effects. Once one happens the irradiated promo is removed until they enter the tile again.

10% : unit goes insane and joins the barbarians
20% : unit dies out right
5%: unit gains a good mutation (maybe a third eye that grants an additional first strike?)
20%: unit gains a bad mutation (maybe weakness that causes a loss of str)
10%: unit gains a useless promo like an additional toe =)

no unit should be immune unless they have the radiation immune promo.

 

[davidlallen]

That is a good suggestion, and it fits well with the "Fallout" games where you would be irradiated and lose strength after a certain amount of exposure. I have already gone through several different implementations of "cannot move into fallout". The problem is that the AI calls this routine literally millions of times, to the point where it already consumes 80% (!!) of the runtime of the game just to determine that you cannot move into fallout. When I turn off this particular feature in my code, an autoplay game is literally five times faster.

Clearly any mechanic which "may" have some bad effect will take more runtime. The AI would need to make some kind of value judgement to determine if moving into some particular fallout, with some particular set of units, is worth the chance of taking damage or losing the units. Until I can find some way to make the simple binary rule check faster, I don't want to do anything which will make it even slower.

So, that is a good idea and I'd like to do it, but I have to solve the runtime problem first.

 

[Deon]

I'd like to suggest the "biomass" idea from Tiberian Sun.
If you do not want to play with various mutations or you could add this feature to the above suggestion. The unit will take some damage while on fallout and less damage for some time after he leaves the fallout. And while the "radiated" promotion on (it disappears after the unit is fully healed/some special treatment) the unit has a chance to generate a "biomass"/"mutants" weak barbarian unit. Because I think that AI will walk through fallout pretty often and 30% chance to lose the unit is too much. This way you can still lose it to mutants/damage but at least you will have a chance to protect it.
Also it could work as a "cold war" strategy: you could intentionally harm your weak units and send them to some neighbour's borders to make mutants from them and to disturb him without declaring a war.

 

[davidlallen]

The idea of spawning weak mutant units on walking through fallout is an interesting one. But, the main point is that the AI has to *understand* that fallout is passable but dangerous. As a human player, you would certainly avoid moving through fallout if the detour didn't add on a turn to the trip. You might move through fallout if it was in a chokepoint and the detour would take several turns. There are cases where you would definitely move through fallout and accept the damage, for example to kill a powerful but seriously wounded enemy. Unless the AI can reason about fallout like that (without chewing up serious runtime) then I will have to leave it as simply impassable.