Improving War / Resource Management

[Allthing]

Hi all,

Long time Civ2 player, first time poster.

My idea is this: Military units should have a settler like aspect to them.

Lets say I create a rifleman. He costs me 40 shields to build and one shield per turn. He's expendable ... if he dies I build another. All my city has lost is 40 shields plus his 1 shield per turn. Even if my population is small, if I've got some mines and forest I can build many of these rifleman (way more than my population could sustain) and it will never dent my already small population. I can send 20 of these riflemen to war overseas, get them all killed, and back home nothing will have really changed. Sure I've lost what I could have built with those shields but that's it. In fact my population will probably gone up in the interim. This is silly and very far removed from reality.

Now if military units are just like settlers things would be very different. When I create my rifleman, he will cost both food and shields to maintain. More importantly, my rifleman will LOWER the population of his home city by 1. Building lots of rifleman in a small but resource laden city will become harder because of his food upkeep and constant drain on the size of the population. Now I lets say I raise an army of 20 rifleman and send them to their deaths. My home population is devastated and ive lost the shields. Or think of a protracted war like WWI. Over time, my city population will drop steadily, making it harder to build units altogether. That sounds more like it.

Other cool benefits would include actually being able to starve a city via siege (if you create a food deficit, settlers [now military units] are lost) and you can march into the city. This would force enemies to fight battles in the open field instead of lamely waiting behind their city walls. Thus, if you allow your land to be overrun, your armies will disband and you will quickly die. That sounds right to me.

Moreover, armies should be able to build roads, irrigation, mines and cities. Historically they always have, why not in civ 2?

 

[Catfish]

Take a look at DarthVeda's Operation Herbstnebel scenario. To simulate the fuel shortages experienced by the Germans during the Battle of the Bulge, mobile infantry, armour and aircraft were all assigned the settler flag.

 

[Allthing]

I had a feeling I wasn't the first person to think of this. How does the AI respond to the settler designation? I'm guessing they would never use them to attack and would just build roads and forts.

 

[Catfish]

I believe so.

 

[yoshi]

I had a feeling I wasn't the first person to think of this. How does the AI respond to the settler designation? I'm guessing they would never use them to attack and would just build roads and forts.

If I remember correctly, I've seen the units with 'settle' role attack when given an attack factor. Of course, the will build forts instead of fortifying themselves. Not

If you don't mind having every unit be able to build roads, irrigation and mines. Of course you can always prevent irrigation and mining on all terrain but then you won't be able to improve the terrain.

The solution there is to use the Engineer slot unit and have it terraform the terrain to an 'improved' variant (e.g. 'Irrigated Grassland' or 'Mined Hills'). That way it will be the only unit that can "improve" terrain. Not sure how well the AI uses the Engineer's terraform function though. (You can always use events to change the terrain for the AI--just be warned that changeterrain-affected tiles delete everything on those tiles, including units.)

Note that 0-fuel air units can improve terrain--so airships, helicopters or whatever will be able to build roads and such.

If you don't want your units to build cities, the only way to do it is to max out your cities (i.e. have 255 cities on the map) so that no further cites can be build until one is destroyed. (I think the number can be slightly increased for Barbarian cities--meaning you would be able to build more cities if Barbs capped one. Not sure about this though.)

[Of course, you can also add a "house rule" stating that players cannot build new cities--certainly easier design-wise but I, like others around here try to avoid them as much as possible.]

If your units being able to build cities isn't a big problem but you just don't want to be able to build big production centres (so new cities stay small and are only really useful as air/naval bases), then what you can do is reserve one terrain type as 'City' or something; place that terrain on any city tile and lower food/shield/trade output for all other tiles. That way new cities--those not built on 'city' tiles--will not be able to grow (i.e. only designated cities will grow).

[Tip: Edit City.txt and use short names to represent bases, colonies, forts or whatever and change the size 1 city graphic to something suitable.]

As for the AI units building cities, that's easy: just lower fertility to zero on all tiles using Dusty's 'Mapcopy' utility (or alternatively, just reserve the Plains and Grassland terrain slots--the only two terrain types the AI will settle on--for some impassable terrain, or just don't use them at all. Note that air units ignore impassable terrain so you might have to block it with some invincible static unit if your air units also have the settle role.)

I was working on a WW2 scen a while back where only mechanized units used shields--shields represented general upkeep, including fuel costs--and non-build-able infantry units costing nothing were spawned in at key friendly cities (nice because you couldn't unrealistically build infantry in enemy cities, except for kind of cheap static 'conscript' unit). Fuel shortages (i.e. key 'oil cities' being captured) would result in high shield output tiles around all owned historical production centres being deleted and loss of treasury funds that would cause production improvements to be sold off, resulting in loss of mechanized units.

Pretty much the same effect only without all of the hassle of dealing with the problems that come with using the 'settle' role.


Sorry for the long post but this is something that has always interested me and I figure I'd just as my two-and-a-half cents.