HOI-style brigades

[maxpublic]

I'm in the process of building a very un-Civ-like scenario called After The Holocaust, which starts with gunpowder units and progresses incrementally rather than by huge leaps. In order to differentiate the units and make the combat somewhat more interesting, I've developed a brigade system like the one in HOI. Haven't tested it yet so I'm not sure if it works as advertised, but I've broken down the infantry in each 'era' so that you can do the following with it:

Types
=====

Foot - basic infantry, no modifications; 5 mp
Motorized - increases movement by 3 mp
Mechanized - increases movement by 5 mp (10 total), allows infantry to blitz
Amphibious - turns infantry into marines, can assault directly from transports

Brigades
======

Engineer - ignore river penalties, increased defense bonus in cities, forests, and jungles
Field Hospital - heals units in same and adjacent tiles
Artillery - allows infantry to first strike, unless the opposing unit also has artillery
Antitank - gives infantry a bonus against armor
Antiair - gives infantry a chance to intercept air units in the same or adjacent tile

I'm thinking about adding 'airmobile' to the type of infantry, then disallowing brigades for that type of unit (airmobile units don't have attached heavy brigades, for obvious reasons).

Infantry can only have one brigade at a time.

All brigades reduce the movement of the infantry by -2 and increase the cost of the unit by 50%. Motorization costs 25%, while mechanization costs 50%. That means that a mechanized infantry division with an attached artillery brigade would cost twice what a foot infantry division with no brigades does. This might be increased by 50%/100% if motorizing/mechanizing a division isn't expensive enough.

All changes are represented on the unit by promotion icons; most of the promotions were removed from the game. That way once you get used to the icon changes you can tell at a glance whether the unit is motorized, or has a field hospital, and so on.

I haven't gotten to armor yet, but I'm thinking that armor will be able to have brigades as well (except the field hospital). Unlike HOI I don't think I'm going to differentiate between self-propelled units and non-self-propelled units; too much detail for too little benefit.

Any thoughts on how to make the system more interesting, or problems that might crop up that I haven't thought of?

Max

 

[Colonel Kraken]

How are you going to add HoI style brigades to Civ? I like the idea, just curious how.

 

[Kushan]

Lots of scripting?

Kushan

 

[Exel]

It could be done quite easily with promotions. You just wouldn't get more than one per unit. The "brigade" promotions could be then suplemented with the regular promotions that would normally be given with additional exp - or they could be left out entirely, but then exp would have no role in the game.

 

[maxpublic]

Experience is still in the game, and can still be used to purchase the combat promotions - e.g., combat1, combat2, and so forth. You can't purchase movement changes or brigades with experience.

For these things you have to upgrade - or downgrade, as the case may be. Just like any other unit upgrade, if you select the unit it'll give you the option to upgrade/downgrade. So you can motorize or de-motorize, add an anti-tank brigade, swap an anti-tank brigade for artillery, and so on. As you change options for your infantry unit the promotions icons will change for that unit (apart from the combat increases you may have earned through experience).

Externally the process looks seamless to the player. Internally it's considerably more complicated, although I'm doing my best to avoid coding in Python. For one thing, I'm lazy and don't want to learn a new language; for another, I don't want to make anyone else learn Python either if they want to fool around with changes to my mod. So right now the whole process is xml-based.

In essence, every variation of unit is, in fact, a new unit. So you actually upgrade to a new unit every time you swap brigades or change movement types. That is, foot with an artillery brigade is a different unit from foot with antiair, or motorized with an artillery brigade. Your 'upgrade tree' for that unit specifies all others in that class that you can swap to. The 'promotions', which represent brigades or movement changes, come with the unit you upgrade to under FreePromotions; these promotions list no unit under UnitCombats, so they can never be earned through experience.

That's essentially how you make it look like it's a single unit that's changing brigades, or motorizing, or whatever, to the player.

Max

 

[Colonel Kraken]

Interesting idea, very interesting. Good luck!

 

[maxpublic]

Still haven't tested, and not at all sure how the upgrade process is going to work. I have no idea of how Civ decides which units are available at tech level X and which are not; guess I'll get a semi-definitive answer when I try to run the first iteration of the mod.

I added airmobile (no brigades) and changed the motorization/mechanization stuff around a bit. Motorized units can no longer enter forest or jungle squares unless they have an engineer, and mech can't enter jungle. Same thing goes for armor.

Armor can have ART, AT, and AA brigades, but not ENG or MED.

Tech 7 (future tech) now has Armored Infantry and Advanced Armor for infantry and tank units, as well as their own set of very advanced brigades. Any war started with Future Era units is going to be very, very destructive. Fiddling with the tactical nuke option showed me that Python (if not the SDK) would be needed to get it to work properly.

On to air and naval. At least those won't have brigade units.

Max