Independent Civilization ideas

What should be the scope of the game

  • Clone with same bugs and limitations

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Looking good. If you import a BIQ file how does it affect rules? Or is only the map uploadable?

Also, I know you are getting bombarded with a lot of suggestions and requests. But I have another idea on units.
It would be nice to make a limit on some units. I can think of units like a Pope, Praetorian or the Musashi and Yamato where civ should only be able to make one or a few of these units.
 
I was going to propose the same thing for buildings. My idea was that, besides one-off buildings, you could have no more of this or that building, say, a mint, at the same time. For different buildings you could have different limits and also specify whether buildings could be rebuilt in the same city or in a different one, also settable -or not, like Small Wonders. This could also change according to your government, to the techs you already have… or to the location. A building could be specified to be buildable only in cities on X tiles around a given tile.

I'd never thought about it for units… but it makes sense. A suggestion: maybe we could establish a certain cap for units being tied to other units? In a scenario involving convoys you could have only a few Escorts for each unit that is going to be escorted (therefore preventing you from simply stacking up those highly mobile units with awesome defense and lethal bomardment before even building whatever you are going to escort)… I fear I ramble too much.

Maybe also a unit can be built only if you do not meet a condition? You can build a unit only if a certain tech hasn't been discovered, or only if you are not under a specified government or religion because that government or religion forbids that particular unit.

Also an even further thought, if you can lease units, you can't borrow or buy units from a state at war with a state you currently have troops on loan from. :)
 
Looking good. If you import a BIQ file how does it affect rules? Or is only the map uploadable?

Also, I know you are getting bombarded with a lot of suggestions and requests. But I have another idea on units.
It would be nice to make a limit on some units. I can think of units like a Pope, Praetorian or the Musashi and Yamato where civ should only be able to make one or a few of these units.


Well I'll be importing the map, city and unit placements. As for the rules I'll be importing most of them I should think, that is of course if you mean things like Civilizations, City Improvements, Techs, Governments, etc. If you mean the actual options within each area then that will come later, I will try to incorporate as much of it as possible.

I like the idea of limiting a unit to a one time construction, that should be quite easy to add.
 
I asked this in the private forum section and only got 1 reply, so throwing this here to see what the rest of you think.

I'm trying to decide whether how to implement relief/overlays as.

Is there any difference between relief and graphical overlays on the terrain?

Or can you see a need for both types and what would they be for?

Resources would be separate from these 2 types.
 
I think the easiest would be to allow many different mountains types.
Forested hills
Forested mountain
Jungle hills
Desert hill
Rocky mountain, etc

And let the modders define the bonus /graphics for each type.

It's probably a lot easier than trying to have one relief (hill/mountain) + climate (desert, grassland) + one vegetation (forest, jungle).

Perhaps not as clean, efficient or modular, but more practical
 
how do you define the difference between relief and graphical overlay?

I have a lot of opinion, again. I made a little chart for myself, once, of the order of all of the overlay layers. They were, top to bottom:

Resources
Pollution
Craters
Airfields-barbarian camps
Fortress - Radar
Rivers
Ruins
Rails
Roads
Mine-Irrigation
Snow Mountains-Flood Plain
Hills-Mountains (+LM)
Forest-Jungle-Marsh (+LM)
LM Terrain
X Terrain

IMHO the roads & rails layer should have been moved above the river layer. Forests, on the other hand, would look better if the roads were 'under' them.

The easiest way to make overlays infinitely moddable would be to make it possible for additional overlays to be added in the editor. As in -

Type: road New Name: Freeway File Location: Art/Terrain/road2

The Type designation would mean it would use the same format as the original, in the same manner that railroads now use the same format as roads, and mountains and snow mountains use the same format. Easy, see? Then we could make all sorts of new overlays, and you won't have to worry about making them yourself.

I'd like to discuss in particular, however: Railroads, Navigable rivers, tunnels, bridges, flooding, fog, burnt land, parched land, dunes, dead calm, mesa, Glacial Ice. Graphics are already available for most of these, or could be easily made, I think.

Now, to make it possible to create seasons or time of day within a mod, you could allow the player to designate that the terrain folder would change to a nested folder at a designated point in the game, like an era change or after (or every) x number of turns. Extra points if you could give it a transition-fade.

And for the topper: Multiple maps. Ever play CivII: Test of Time? I remember games with underground/underwater map, a stratosphere map, a space station map and of course an alien world map. Great games. I really miss that.

Graphics for each would be again a matter of placing nested folders, so that a Scenario's Art folder, with all of the changes we've discussed, might look like:

Art
_Terrain
__Map 1 (underground/underwater)
___Map 2 (Terra firma)
____Winter
_______Winter Day
_______Winter Night
_____Summer
______Summer Day
______Summer Night

____Map 3 (Stratosphere)
_____Map 4 (Space)
______Map 5 (Planet)

All maps would use every scenario folder in common except for the designated Terrain folders, so the average mod would only be a few MB bigger, even if all these folders were added; and of course, I'm assuming that all this would be optional in the first place, so no one would need to worry that they have to do all that to make a mod.

Multiple maps may have nothing to do with layers and overlays, but I'd hate to hear later that this was the time to bring it up, i.e., when you were working on layers...

Please forgive the length of this post. And Remember - you asked!
 
Just remembered a feature I have been missing regarding improvements: A checkbox next to required resource where you can decide if that particular resource needs to be within city limits. For example a brewery needs both barley and hops, but only barley needs to be within city limits. Also, a possibility to add more than two resources as requirement could be useful.

BTW: I agree with ShiroKobbures suggestion to have the possibility to restrict the number of units.
 
how do you define the difference between relief and graphical overlay?

I have a lot of opinion, again. I made a little chart .........

Thank you very much for the detailed end in-depth answer, every response should be like this. I shall take this all on board.
 
I absolutely love the multiple maps from Test of Time. If you can implement this I would be eternally grateful.

The ability for a unit to automatically transfer from one map to another; the ability to have 'gates' that allow teleportation to other 'gates' on other maps. The possibilities are endless.

How about the options to teleport from one 'gate' to another specific 'gate', or to a gate of the player's choice. This could be 'gate' dependent.

Units could have the option to teleport to a specific home 'gate', or to any 'gate'.
 
A long standing, personal bugaboo. A Roman Warrior in 3,000 BCE should not be able to walk to China!

I'd love to see limits on how from a friendly city (or road) a unit can be; just as there are bldgs which allow increase in city size, an analogue for distance, with variables which can be set by the player, would be fantastic.

Cheers,

Oz
 
I've had an idea: we could apply depth to water! it might be a bti tricky but if you're scripting units a la Civ4 then you can just specify, say, that submarines are only invisible if the water's deep enough for them to hide, you can only build bridges and other water-based structure up to this or that depth, if you want to build the aforementioned oil rigs, the cost could vary on the water depth. :)
I asked this in the private forum section and only got 1 reply, so throwing this here to see what the rest of you think.

I'm trying to decide whether how to implement relief/overlays as.

Is there any difference between relief and graphical overlays on the terrain?

Or can you see a need for both types and what would they be for?

Resources would be separate from these 2 types.
An overlay is something like a river or such, a bridge is a terrain feature, the height/relief is the z in an x,y,z coordinate system.
Just remembered a feature I have been missing regarding improvements: A checkbox next to required resource where you can decide if that particular resource needs to be within city limits. For example a brewery needs both barley and hops, but only barley needs to be within city limits. Also, a possibility to add more than two resources as requirement could be useful.

BTW: I agree with ShiroKobbures suggestion to have the possibility to restrict the number of units.
:) You can also, if you have a 'manufactured' resource, have it be manufactured locally or not.
 
How about revolutions occuring when citizens are particularly unhappy? I mean sort of like city flipping, except timed to make several cities, particularly formerly foreign-owned or overseas form a new civilization when a certain limit is reached. The limit could be edited in the governments section of the editor.

Ditto on Oz's suggestion; although it could be made more complex by adding supply chains to support invasions over long distances. Maybe a worker action that can be placed even in enemy territory to make a supply camp that adds range to the deployment of troops. Of course, different units would have different ranges, or unlimited, changeable in the editor.
 
Thank you very much for the detailed end in-depth answer, every response should be like this. I shall take this all on board.

Then be prepared for more. I've been manipulating this terrain for many years, and I've developed some definite ideas about how it should, and could work.

A long standing, personal bugaboo. A Roman Warrior in 3,000 BCE should not be able to walk to China!

Alexander the Great's men walked to India. Someone crossed the Bering Strait long before that. But I see your point. Let's say you could arrange it so that a unit that is not within its Civ's influence, and not connected by road, port, or other means, would lose say, a tenth of a hitpoint for each turn it remains separated, unless 'healed' by rest (say, 2 turns, unless 'trained' which would reduce it to 1) or food. I assume 'corruption' was originally meant to cover that..

That makes me think: perhaps irrigation, mines, roads and rails could be made to deteriorate (roads fade, fields darken..) unless re-worked occasionally. That would make things more interesting.

Which brings me to a big, glaring, awful oversight that has always existed: Healing units. I don't know whey they were never included.

Surely if the mechanism exists for buildings to improve mood, heal units, increase trade, etc., might we allow units to do the same in the square (or range of squares) they occupy? Suddenly, food, priests, medics, food supplies, drugs, merchants, spells, booze, cops, celebrities, EMTs, politicians, and many more units would have a purpose and function beyond brute strength or terraforming. Interestingly, many units of this sort are already in the database, waiting around for something to do.
 
I absolutely love the multiple maps from Test of Time. If you can implement this I would be eternally grateful.

The ability for a unit to automatically transfer from one map to another; the ability to have 'gates' that allow teleportation to other 'gates' on other maps. The possibilities are endless.

How about the options to teleport from one 'gate' to another specific 'gate', or to a gate of the player's choice. This could be 'gate' dependent.

Units could have the option to teleport to a specific home 'gate', or to any 'gate'.

Am I right in understanding that this means playing on many different maps interconected by 'gates'? So I'm moving my unit and it hits the edge of one map then comes up on a different map? That sounds like a great idea if that is what you mean.

Aslo definitely want to stress the usefulness of being able to set how many of a unit/building can be owned at a time by a civ. Great for making hero/leader units. For an RPG it would be invaluable!

Also, I liked the sugesstion that units have levels, though I guess it wouldn't be a priority.
 
That's so WarCraft III! *kawaiiiXD*
 
Am I right in understanding that this means playing on many different maps interconected by 'gates'? So I'm moving my unit and it hits the edge of one map then comes up on a different map? That sounds like a great idea if that is what you mean.

Ah, Nick, you missed Test of Time! Great gaming. It's been awhile since I played.

But I still have the manual. In the Science Fiction Scenario section it has a good description of world-jumping:
Spoiler :

It can help to picture the the planets of the Lalannde system as a stack of four flat planes. In addition to the normal x (longitude) and y (Latitude) axes, there's now a "vertical" dimension - a z axis. Four unique maps are located along this axis, and each terrain square on a world map corresponds with the squares directly "above" and 'below' it. So, for example, if you had a unit at map coordinates (15,35) on Funestis, that unit could move normally on the surface or it might be able to jump up to (15,35) in Orbit or follow an outbound Hohmann trajectory to Naumachia or even Mona.

There are several ways to move between the worlds, but there are two requirements that must be met: one concerns the moving unit and the other the terrain. First, the moving unit (and any passengers) must be able to exist at the destination. Otherwise, it cannot travel to or be carried there. Many units cannot survive in the inhospitable vacuum of space (Orbit) or on planets with extremely thin (Naumachia) or poisonous atmospheres. In addition, not all space-going vessels are designed for to enter a planet's atmosphere or to land at all, and some units are designed for very specific environments. The majority of your forces suffer limitations of some kind in terms of which maps they can visit.

Next, the corresponding terrain square on the destination map (the place the unit wants to move to) must be of the same domain - ground or sea - that the unit is currently standing on (or floating in). Ground units can only move from Ground square to ground square, and naval units from sea square to sea square. Every map has different land masses and oceans, and finding a spot where transport is possible can sometimes be a test of patience. Units cannot change maps directly from onboard a transport vessel. When a unit has the possibility to change maps, the border around its key conveniently changes color to note this.

Note that units with a native ability to move between maps cannot lift off within a city square, unless that city has a Spaceport improvement (in which case, they'll use it). For the safety of the population, they must move at least one terrain square away from a City Center before their TELEPORT orders can become active.


Both the Science Fiction and Fantasy (where the maps are Surface World, Cloud World, Undersea World and Underworld) sections of the manual use the same basic description for Moving between Worlds. So the Fantasy section completes the chapter begun above as follows:
Spoiler :

Some units can travel between the worlds on their own. For the others, there are two kinds of physical connections between the worlds: some can be built, while others are pre-existing. Tunnel entrances are transport sites - built in the open, outside city squares. Astral portals are city improvements, built only inside cities. Every tribe can build Astral Portals (once they have learned the requisite technology), but only Goblin Miners and Dwarves can build Tunnel Entrances. That's one reason to befriend the Dwarves, and it's also a good reason to keep a wary eye on the Goblins' territory.

The two pre-existing types that no one can build are Gates to Hel and, in the Midgard scenario only, Jormungard's Maw. The Gates to Hel are gateways between the surface world and the underworld, you must find them before you can use them. The Maw leads to the belly of the Beast...


In addition, Aircraft could go from the Surface world to the Cloud world, and submarines could travel from the surface to the undersea world, just as in life.

For ideas of what could be done in the Civ2:ToT multiple-map environment, see the Scenario League Forum right here at CivFanatics. On a personal note, it was the old Scenario League website that first introduced me to Civ mods, and through them I found the CivFanatics forums.
 
Impressively quick progress! Good to see!

Slightly tangential, but I'm glad you mentioned testing with SoE... been waiting for that scenario for a long time and I'd missed its release announcement.
 
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