Hammers -> Unit Upgrades

[DigitalBoy]

The idea behind exorbitantly high upgrade prices is clear. Being able to upgrade for cheap would be borderline exploitative. I recall disconnecting resources in CivIII just to build obsolete units for less shields, reconnecting the resource, and paying gold to upgrade them was an exploit that had to be amended.

Fair enough, but I still think it's bogus that I have to delete entire armies of units just because I don't have the gold to upgrade them all. Wouldn't it make a lot more sense to be able to spend hammers to upgrade units instead of (or in addition to for all those purists) unreasonably high amounts of gold?

Send an obsolete unit to a city with a barracks (or drydock or airport for naval and air units) and then have a unit action that removes the unit from the game "attached" to the city. Then the city gets a new build option where it upgrades the old unit (with promotions) to a modern unit by spending an amount of hammers equal to the difference.

That way you have a relatively non-exploitable and much more efficient way to upgrade units so that I don't have to delete my 20 archers come Feudalism. >_>

 

[SkippyT]

Seems fair enough.
I've always thought that spending gold on upgrading units was silly, but spending hammers on it sounds more realistic.

 

[Giaur]

Just produce wealth for several turns. It's up to you, if you want small modern army or numerous army, but with older weaponary ...

 

[DigitalBoy]

Just produce wealth for several turns. It's up to you, if you want small modern army or numerous army, but with older weaponary ...

Wealth is what, 1 gold/hammer? And upgrading is something ridiculous like 4 gold per hammer difference plus a "fee" of 20 gold. Upgrading an archer to a longbowmen costs something in the range of 90-100 gold, so using Wealth to upgrade would require about 100 hammers, twice the hammer cost of a longbowmen.

 

[Jerrymander]

Excellent idea. Makes sense, sort of like retrofitting. Perhaps one could promote by paying hammers/gold as well?

 

[Suspiria]

Yes i love the hammer upgarde idea and i also think there should be some sort of option to automatically upgrade all your obsolete units.

 

[Yakk]

Use an empire-wide hammer tax!

Charge: 1.5 per hammer different, plus 5 hammers.

The hammers are removed from your empire uniformly. If you happen to not have enough this turn, they are carried over to next turn. Unit building multipliers are used.

If you have no hammer production anywhere (due to a too-large hammer debt), you cannot upgrade a unit via hammers.

 

[Quintillus]

Use an empire-wide hammer tax!

Charge: 1.5 per hammer different, plus 5 hammers.

Although it sounds kind of funny (and I'm sure the hardware stores would object), it does fit in with how you can upgrade units anywhere within your borders in Civ4. Still, if you're building a wonder in a city, you really wouldn't want to lose production even if it is uniformly and therefore just a bit per city.

Therefore, I'm thinking DigitalBoy's in-city idea would be better. However, I'd make it necessary for the city to switch to upgrade work right away - you wouldn't want to forget about that and, after all, it would make more military sense to keep the unit militarily active.

 

[Yakk]

Yes, but it also makes it a ***** to program the AI to do the shuttling of units to be upgraded.

I suppose you can just punt, and continue to give the AI free unit upgrades.

 

[Giaur]

Wealth is what, 1 gold/hammer? And upgrading is something ridiculous like 4 gold per hammer difference plus a "fee" of 20 gold. Upgrading an archer to a longbowmen costs something in the range of 90-100 gold, so using Wealth to upgrade would require about 100 hammers, twice the hammer cost of a longbowmen.

Yeah. Upgrading should be cheaper. However 1 hammer does not equal 1 commerce. It depends on the age of the game. But 1 hammer replaces about 2 commerce. SO 95 commerce to upgrade longbow mean about 46 hammers. It's 21 hammers more than it should be. I would not complicate game too much. I would leave 20 coins fee and lowered the price of upgrading to proportions 2:1. Or leave the proportion as they are (3:1) and lower the price by 20 coins.

btw. Your idea is even better, while it prevents city from building anything else and is itself some sort of penalty. But I am afraid it could be hard work for the programmers.

 

[Giaur]

My calculation is simple:

1 food = 2 hammers = 4 coins

It helps me very much in many occasions, especially when founding cities. This is also explanation why plains are worse than grasslands.

 

[Diamondeye]

I like the idea, but as said above, what a mess to incoorporate in programming and AIs... How about this: An obsolete unit could destroy itself to "train" another units of the same class half the experience amount of its worth. This would destroy the obsolete unit. Only units of level 2 and 3 should be able to be trained (or the training should eliminate existing experience) by other units.

-Diamondeye